KM 2437 bis KM 3044 – Fleurieur Peninsula//Adelaide//Barossa Valley//Flinders Range: German beer, free WiFi and lots of wine on our way to the Outback

After a highlight like the Great Ocean Road the next stop can’t really excite you any more and that’s exactly what happened at Fleurieur Peninsula just south of Adelaide.
Apparently it’s a beautiful place with lots hiking opportunities and all sorts of Australian wildlife (well, the sorts that can’t kill you in seconds, that is). However, it may be magnificent and blooming and beautiful and whatever in spring, but now, in late autumn, it’s mostly brown and dry and boring and dead. But at least we got a closer look at (and about 50 pictures of) a couple of kangaroos, hoping happily around the area, so at least the detour was good for something.
Next stop Adelaide: Also, in spring probably a beautiful, charming place with lots of green and parks and stuff, but again: in autumn – not. Especially not on Easter Monday when everything is closed (which on the other hand was probably a good thing as our credit cards are still recovering from our stay in Sydney). All we can say about Adelaide: The local branch of the State library has free WiFi and power outlets for your laptop and it’s open even on public holidays.
Continuing on to the Barossa Valley, one of Australia’s premium wine regions, we also passed through Hahndorf. Sounds kind of German? It actually is Australia’s oldest German settlement with an according marketing strategy and lots of German beer, pretzels and sausages everywhere (at prices that suggest the stuff being sold here is actually made in Germany and is delivered exclusively to Hahndorf on a daily basis). But it was nice to have a really good German beer again, even though for that price we probably could have asked our friends at home to send us one here, that couldn’t have been much more expensive.
A lot cheaper, actually usually free, but just as much fun was the wine tasting we did in Barossa Valley, trying all the really good expensive ones, and finally always settling for the cheap ones (“Yes, could I try the Chardonnay, please? Yes, the one at 300$ a bottle…. OK, yeah, very good, but I think we’d rather take the Pinot Noir at 11,95 a bottle, thanks a lot”). And luckily our stay in the Valley also coincided with the local harvest market which might not sound quite that exciting, but was actually a great experience, just having a relaxed afternoon with the locals, listening to band playing, trying free samples of home-made bread, sausages, pies, etc. at the stands (A LOT OF free samples….).
However, after so much delicacies we went back to our simple camping life in the woods, so to speak, with a short detour to Flinders Range national park where we got to enjoy two great hikes, lots of beautiful lookouts and some more upclose encounters with a couple of kangaroos.
And now comes the part where we head of into the very heart of Australia, the Outback, probably the part of our stay in Oz that we’ve been most curious about (OK, yes, the wine was also quite high up on the list…). Stocked up with supplies and water, our fuel tank is full, so let’s see what’s it like to drive for days through basically Nothing…