The Limestone Coast

At Cape Bridgewater, there is an amazing fossilized forest...

Or is it? The Europeans who first settled here certainly thought so. The theory was that a forest had been engulfed by sand, emerging much later as hollowed out trunks. Not so. These are sandstone tube-like formations weathered and hollowed out by wind and water over the centuries. 

(With a wind farm nearby)

Just north of the small community of Nelson, in the Lower Glenelg River National Park is the Princess Margaret Rose Cave which was discovered by a couple of farmers out rabbit hunting in 1936. One of them got up enough nerve to be lowered down the hole by rope, and he discovered amazing chambers of stalactites, stalagmites, helictites, and shawl formations...

These two men and their families got permission to develop the cave as a tourist attraction, and Buckingham Palace gave permission for it to be named after the beautiful princess (I wonder if she ever visited it?)  They carved out an entrance by hand because of course tourists couldn't be lowered down by rope, and these 69 stairs are still in use today, but with handrails. The cave is now maintained by the park service.

We stopped overnight in Mount Gambier, and visited Blue Lake the next morning. 

This is a deep crater of an extinct volcano and has been the town water supply for over a hundred years. It turns this brilliant blue each summer due to calcium carbonate crystals forming in the warmer surface water. Ground water seeps into the lake from the surrounding area, filtering through limestone. 

The highlight of the last couple of days has been our visit(s) to the Naracoorte Caves National Park, a World Heritage listed site. This is an extensive network of caves, and one in particular, the Victoria Fossil Cave, preserves the fossilized bones of large marsupials which became extinct 40,000 years ago. These are two models of skeletons found...

Animal bones have been dated back as far as 500,000 years ago. This is still a major scientific study site, with many more layers still to unearth.

We enjoyed the visit to the Victoria cave so much that we returned at sunset to watch bats emerge from the nearby Bat Cave. Lloyd managed to photograph a couple...look in the upper left corner of this image...

And the upper right corner of this one...

And the next morning we returned again to the park to visit the interpretive centre, and Lloyd posed with a life-size sculpture of one of the extinct animals...

We wrapped up our visit to the Limestone Coast with an escorted afternoon winery tour in Coonawarra. We visited an amazing 9 wineries, and found some very decent Rose wines and sparkling wines, including a sparkling Shiraz, very unusual. This area is known for its reds, particularly Cabernet Sauvignon. As in all wine regions, they make a big deal about the soil. This red soil is rich in iron over a layer of limestone...the same limestone as the caves.