The English Reserve

We are now in a town called Mount Gambia, in South Australia, we arrived this morning and will stay a couple of days.

We left Williams Town on Monday morning, it was a great weekend. On Sunday we drove by some of the wineries in the Barossa Valley, we saw the huge Jacobs Creek vineyards, there are acres and acres of them. It was quite late by the time we got out though so wine tasting was out of the question, especially after the late night on Saturday.

After we left Williams Town we decided to head to the coast as the heat in the Adelaide region was unbearable for us, the sun beats down all day with not a cloud in the sky and temperatures of over 30c. All you can do is sit in the shade and try to keep cool (no real hard ship there!)
After some research in the Lonely Planet we headed for a place called Robe and we were glad we did. It is a very small and very quiet town, but the cost line is stunning. Aquamarine waters and white sands with a lovely cool breeze, it was just what we needed after a full on Ozzie weekend. We managed to get the best pitch on the camp site too and access to the beach was maybe 30 metres away, heaven.

We booked in for 3 night's and was even going to do a fourth we were enjoying the peace and quiet so much, but yesterday the peace and tranquility came to an abrupt end when an Ozzie mother and her two young kids invaded the pitch opposite. I'm not totally anti kids, in fact it wasn't even the kids that were the problem it was the grown up. She was one of those loud types, that has to talk the children through everything that she's doing, do you know the sort? She NEVER shut up and was extremely loud, constantly telling the children off, threatening to take them home if they carried on mis behaving, all this was going on while she was also telling them what she was doing. "I'm putting the tent up now, then were going to have some tea, then maybe we can go into town and have an ice cream, if you do that one more time Joshua you will sit in the car, Mummy just needs to get the chairs out, Joshua what did you have to do that for, you have destroyed it (God knows what she was referring to?!). Anyway this went on and on and on, she never paused for breath. We knew then that we wouldn't be staying a 4th night.

I mentioned in my previous blog how friendly the Ozzies are, and believe me they are, but they are friendly bordering on irritating. No matter where we go or who we meet along the way, we are bombarded with information, it kinda goes like this:

Ozzie:where ya from
Us:England"
Ozzie:how long ya got in Oz?
Us:6 weeks
Ozzie:Where ya going?
Us:Not too sure really, no concrete plans

Then it starts and we get a tirade of instructions of where to go, how to get there, where not to go, why did you go there, how do you plan to get here, what do you want to go there for. This goes on and on and on until we eventually lose the will to live. Were quite polite people me and Matt and wouldn't dream of offending people, but the fact is we are two pretty intelligent, independent, well travelled individuals, who have just travelled half way around the world to get to Oz, do you think we are the kind of people who welcome this inane advice day in day out. It is getting to the point now where we keep our sunglasses on for fear of making eye contact with anybody and having to go through the whole damn charade again.

I asked Matt if it was me that had a problem as I have to admit I'm not the most patient of people (ask Stew!) but Matt is as dog tired of it as I am, the only difference being that he is much more laid back than I am, which is probably just as well!

We leave Oz 3 weeks tomorrow for Singapore, we really are looking forward to getting back to some proper travelling and getting hot and sweaty with our back packs again. We are culture vultures at heart and unfortunately Oz does not tick all the boxes for us. It is a lovely country to visit, the climate is superb and their alfresco living is also good, but there is something lacking that I just can't put my finger on.