A wild Victorian time
Watch whales and peep at penguins around Australia’s Victor Harbor.
VICTOR HARBOR, Australia — As my friend Jim and I headed south through the Fleurieu Peninsula from McLaren Vale, past beaches popular with surfers, Route B23 eventually headed inland through eucalyptus-covered hills and pastureland.
There are only tiny towns here and remote, secluded beaches. We liked to bushwalk in the Deep Creek Conservation Park, where we spotted clouds of white corellas, kookaburras and cockatoos, and watched ’roos and wallabies grazing under the gum trees with the brilliant blue Gulf St. Vincent as a backdrop.
Sometimes we split our visit to stay a few nights in Victor Harbor on the south coast, a popular Adelaide summer weekend retreat with vacation homes lining its beaches.
It’s a charming — sometimes cheesy — old-world seaside town dating to 1863 with Victorian buildings, fish and chip shops, the Cockle Train heritage railway that runs to nearby Goolwa, as well as a horsedrawn antique tram that takes visitors across a narrow wooden pedestrian causeway to Granite Island.
The mile-long path encircling the island, a nature park, was part of my morning power walk past giant granite boulders tinged with bright orange lichen. Sometimes I saw New Zealand fur seals and sea lions just offshore, and I’ve spotted southern right whales too.
Victor Harbor and adjoining Encounter Bay, once home to 19th century whaling stations, are where the cetaceans return every year from June through September to mate and give birth. There is plenty of opportunity for whale watching.
Granite Island itself is uninhabited except for Little penguins, the world’s smallest penguin species, that waddle onto the island beaches at dusk in time for nightly penguin-peeping tours departing from the island’s Penguin, Marine and Environmental Centre, which also cares for injured birds and releases them into the wild.
At times we rented bikes and cycled the 13.5-mile Encounter Bikeway from Victor Harbor to Goolwa. En route is Port Elliot, where it’s always a major decision whether to indulge in Port Elliot Bakery’s legendary meat pies or to succumb to fish and chips whose aroma drifted temptingly along the beach, mingling with the smell of eucalyptus and sea salt.