From swimming with sea lions to shucking fresh oysters, the Eyre Peninsula is an intoxicating blend of natural beauty, thrilling activities and delicious flavours. We captured the entire adventure on the GoPro Hero 12.
Day one
From Adelaide, it’s a short flight to Port Lincoln Airport where you’ll embark on a scenic flight with Lincoln Air Charter. Soar over the expansive coastline and soak up the natural beauty of Lincoln National Park and the rural landscape of the southern Eyre Peninsula.
GoPro tip: Use the handler attachment to capture the view from above.
Embark on a scenic flight with Lincoln Air Charter. (Image: Anita Jokovich)
Venture northwest to Oyster Farm Tours in Coffin Bay , where you can harvest oysters straight from the ocean. Slip into waterproof waders and make your way to the semi-submerged saltwater pavilion where you’ll shuck your own oysters while sipping on a South Australian riesling, all while soaking in the stunning surroundings.
GoPro tip: Attach the bite mount to capture all the hands-free shucking action.
Harvest oysters straight from the ocean. (Image: Anita Jokovich)
Next stop is Yarnbala, a pristine piece of bushland in Coffin Bay owned by Kane Slater and his family who host nature-based experiences. One of South Australia’s last remaining grassy low sheoak woodlands, this area is now critically endangered. Kane’s desire to share this tranquil haven led to the creation of a thoughtfully designed central gathering area around a fire pit, crafted from locally sourced natural and recycled materials. Experiences include a guided tour, foraging for bush tucker and live performances of the didgeridoo and lap steel guitar. Enjoy with woodfired pizzas and drinks such as local gin, wine and craft beer. A magical experience.
GoPro tip: Capture the live music hands-free by using the attached tripod while you sip on a Yarnbala signature G&T made with Green Ant Gin.
Retreat to the comfort of Port Lincoln Hotel , a four-star resort boasting panoramic views of Boston Bay. It’s the perfect pit stop to unwind and relax, allowing you to recharge for the next day’s activities.
Watch live performances at Yarnbala. (Image: Anita Jokovich)
GoPro tip: Charge up your GoPro for the next day while editing and downloading images to social media.
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Day two
Day two promises the highlight of the Port Lincoln experience: swimming with playful sea lions, affectionally known as the ‘puppies of the ocean’. It’s a 90-minute boat trip from Port Lincoln to Blythe Island, where sea lions can usually be seen basking on the shore. While regulations require visitors to maintain a distance of 50 metres, these curious creatures often approach with excitement. During the hour-long swim, you are likely to encounter about a dozen sea lions, whose enthusiasm will grow as you engage with them in play.
GoPro tip: The GoPro is waterproof to 10 metres and built for rugged conditions. Its hydrophobic lens keeps underwater shots crystal clear, so you can capture footage of these magical sea creatures.
Swim with playful sea lions. (Image: Anita Jokovich)
Fuel up at L’Anse French Cafe , known for its flaky French pastries, before embarking on your next adventure.
Make your way to Mikkira Station , a picturesque picnic and camping ground that’s home to a large colony of koalas. Take a stroll through the property to spot koalas in their natural habitat and, if you’re lucky, you might even catch a glimpse of baby joeys nestled in their mothers’ pouches. Indulge in a picnic provided by Australian Coastal Safaris as the sun sets.
GoPro tip: Once the sun has set, you can capture light trails in the night sky with night-lapse videos.
Mikkira Station is home to a large colony of koalas. (Image: Anita Jokovich)
On your last day, experience a 4WD and sandboarding adventure with Australian Coastal Safaris in Lincoln National Park. Enjoy the exhilarating thrill of speeding down the dunes on a sandboard or as a passenger four-wheel-driving on the dunes. Capture footage of the towering sand formations and shimmering waters, all while keeping an eye out for native wildlife. With luck, you might even catch a glimpse of an emu roaming the sandy landscape!
GoPro tip: Use HyperSmooth 6.0 and AutoBoost to keep your videos stable when filming your adventurous pursuits. There’s also a built-in Horizon Lock so you can keep the shot level even when your camera is rotating and moving.
Enjoy the exhilarating thrill of speeding down the dunes. (Image: Anita Jokovich)
After tasting the freshest seafood at the Fresh Fish Place , get ready for an e-biking adventure – the perfect way to explore the coastline without exerting too much effort. Set out from Australian Coastal Safaris and make your way to the marina, located about five kilometres from the town centre. The cycle route traces the coast along the picturesque Parnkalla Trail .
GoPro tip: Consider the chest mount accessory to film video while you’re riding your bike for added safety.
Take in the stunning views with your GoPro. (Image: Anita Jokovich)
Designed to capture high-quality photos and videos, the GoPro Hero 12 has advanced features such as image stabilisation and enhanced image quality. Download the GoPro Quik app as a tool for editing and sharing footage on the go.
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The Grampians just might be the ultimate antidote for the metropolis, writes one returning Aussie ready to disconnect from the modern world and reconnect to the Great outdoors.
There are no kangaroos back in Chicago: they’re all here in the Grampians/Gariwerd . In the heart of the Grampians National Park’s main gateway town, Halls Gap, pods of eastern greys are eating grass beside my parked rental car beneath the stars. Next morning, when I see the backyard of my rented villa on the edge of town for the first time, there are kangaroos feeding beside a slow-moving creek, lined with river red gums.
Five hundred metres up the road, 50 or so of them are eating by the side of the road in a paddock. I pull over to watch and spot three emus. Yellow-tailed black cockatoos fly overhead towards the tall green mountains just beyond town.
‘Kee-ow, keee-oww’… their calls fuse with the maniacal cackle of a kookaburra (or 10). Gawd, how I’ve missed the sound of them. Far above, a wedge-tailed eagle watches, and there you go: the ‘great birds of Australia’ trifecta, all half a kay from the town limits.
Exchanging city chaos for country calm
The park is renowned for its significant diversity of native fauna species. (Image: Visit Victoria/Robert Blackburn)
I’ve come to the Grampians to disconnect, but the bush offers a connection of its own. This isn’t just any bush, mind you. The Grampians National Park is iconic for many reasons, mostly for its striking sandstone mountains – five ridges run north to south, with abrupt, orange slopes which tumble right into Halls Gap – and for the fact there’s 20,000 years of traditional rock art. Across these mountains there are more than 200 recorded sites to see, created by the Djab Wurrung, Jardwadjali and Gunditjmara peoples. It’s just like our outback… but three hours from Melbourne.
I’ve come here for a chance at renewal after the chaos of my life in America’s third-largest city, Chicago, where I live for now, at the whim of a relative’s cancer journey. Flying into Melbourne’s airport, it only takes an hour’s drive to feel far away from any concept of suburbia. When I arrive in Halls Gap two hours later, the restaurant I’m eating at clears out entirely by 7:45pm; Chicago already feels a lifetime ago.
The trails and treasures of the Grampians
Grampians National Park /Gariwerd covers almost 2000 square kilometres. (Image: Ben Savage)
Though the national park covers almost 2000 square kilometres, its best-known landmarks are remarkably easy to access. From my carpark here, among the cockatoos and kangaroos on the fringe of Halls Gap, it only takes 60 seconds’ driving time before I’m winding my way up a steep road through rainforest, deep into the mountains.
Then it’s five minutes more to a carpark that serves as a trailhead for a hike to one of the park’s best vantage points, The Pinnacles . I walk for an hour or so, reacquainting myself with the smells and the sounds of the Aussie bush, before I reach it: a sheer cliff’s edge lookout 500 metres up above Halls Gap.
Overlooking the vast Grampians landscape from Hollow Mountain. (Image: Robert Blackburn)
There are hikes and there are lookouts and waterfalls all across this part of the park near town. Some are a short stroll from a carpark; others involve long, arduous hikes through forest. The longest is the Grampians Peaks Trail , Victoria’s newest and longest iconic walk, which runs 160 kilometres – the entire length of Grampians National Park.
Local activities operator Absolute Outdoors shows me glimpses of the trail. The company’s owner, Adrian Manikas, says it’s the best walk he’s done in Australia. He says he’s worked in national parks across the world, but this was the one he wanted to bring his children up in.
“There’s something about the Grampians,” he says, as he leads me up a path to where there’s wooden platforms for tents, beside a hut looking straight out across western Victoria from a kilometre up in the sky (these are part of the guided hiking options for the trail). “There are things out here that you won’t see anywhere else in Australia.” Last summer, 80 per cent of the park was damaged by bushfire, but Manikas shows me its regrowth, and tells me of the manic effort put in by volunteers from town – with firefighters from all over Australia – to help save Halls Gap.
Spot wildflowers. (Image: Visit Victoria)
We drive back down to Halls Gap at dusk to abseil down a mountain under the stars, a few minutes’ walk off the main road into town. We have headlamps, but a full moon is enough to light my way down. It takes blind faith to walk backwards down a mountain into a black void, though the upside is I can’t see the extent of my descent.
Grampians National Park at sunset. (Image: Wine Australian)
The stargazing is ruined by the moon, of course, but you should see how its glow lights up the orange of the sandstone, like in a theme park. When I’m done, I stand on a rocky plateau drinking hot chocolate and listening to the Aussie animals who prefer nighttime. I can see the streets of Halls Gap off in the distance on this Friday night. The restaurants may stay open until 8pm tonight.
What else is on offer in The Grampians?
Travelling along the Wimmera River in Dimboola. (Image: Chris McConville)
You’ll find all sorts of adventures out here – from rock climbing to canoeing to hiking – but there’s more to the Grampians than a couple of thousand square kilometres of trees and mountains. Halls Gap may be known to most people, but what of Pomonal, and Dimboola, and Horsham? Here in the shadow of those big sandstone mountains there are towns and communities most of us don’t know to visit.
And who knew that the Grampians is home to Victoria’s most underrated wine region ? My disconnection this morning comes not in a forest, but in the tasting rooms and winery restaurants of the district. Like Pomonal Estate, barely 10 minutes’ drive east of Halls Gap, where UK-born chef Dean Sibthorp prepares a locally caught barramundi with lentil, pumpkin and finger lime in a restaurant beside the vines at the base of the Grampians. Husband-and-wife team Pep and Adam Atchison tell me stories as they pour their prize wines (shiraz is the hero in these parts).
Dine in a restaurant beside vines at Pomonal Estate. (Image: Tourism Australia)
Three minutes’ drive back down the road, long-time mates Hadyn Black and Darcy Naunton run an eclectic cellar door out of a corrugated iron shed, near downtown Pomonal. The Christmas before last, half the houses in Pomonal burnt down in a bushfire, but these locals are a resilient lot.
The fires also didn’t stop the construction of the first art centre in Australia dedicated to environmental art in a nature-based precinct a little further down the road (that’s Wama – the National Centre for Environmental Arts), which opened in July. And some of the world’s oldest and rarest grape vines have survived 160 years at Best’s Wines, outside the heritage town of Great Western. There’s plantings here from the year 1868, and there’s wines stored in century-old barrels within 150-year-old tunnels beneath the tasting room. On the other side of town, Seppelt Wines’ roots go back to 1865. They’re both only a 30-minute drive from Halls Gap.
Great Western is a charming heritage town. (Image: Griffin Simm)
There’s more to explore yet; I drive through tiny historic towns that barely make the map. Still part of the Grampians, they’re as pretty as the mountains behind them: full of late 19th-century/early 20th-century post offices, government offices and bank buildings, converted now to all manner of bric-a-brac stores and cafes.
The Imaginarium is one, in quirky Dimboola, where I sleep in the manager’s residence of an old National Australia Bank after a gourmet dinner at the local golf club, run by noted chef and teacher, Cat Clarke – a pioneer of modern Indigenous Australian cooking. Just south, I spend an entire afternoon at a winery, Norton Estate Wines, set on rolling calico-coloured hills that make me think of Tuscany, chit-chatting with owners Chris and Sam Spence.
Being here takes me back two decades, when I lived here for a time. It had all seemed as foreign as if I’d driven to another planet back then (from Sydney/Warrane), but there seemed something inherently and immediately good about this place, like I’d lived here before.
And it’s the Australian small-town familiarity of the Grampians that offers me connection back to my own country. Even in the better-known Halls Gap, Liz from Kerrie’s Creations knows I like my lattes with soy milk and one sugar. And while I never do get the name of the lady at the local Ampol station, I sure know a lot about her life.
Kookaburras are one of some 230 bird species. (Image: Darren Donlen)
You can be a local here in a day; how good is that? In Chicago, I don’t even know who my neighbour is. Though each day at dusk – when the kangaroos gather outside my villa, and the kookaburras and the black cockatoos shout out loud before settling in to sleep – I prefer the quieter connection I get out there in the bush, beneath these orange mountains.
A traveller’s checklist
Staying there
Sleep beside the wildlife on the edge of Halls Gap at Serenity .
