Friday, February 17, 2012

Ceduna, crabs and oysters~

Ceduna was the first town we arrive from the Nullabor. It is the quarantine checkpoint of fruits and vegetables for travelers towards South OZ. That means anyone travelling into Ceduna from Western OZ must not bring any fruit or veggies.

The town attracts many tourists to stop over with its beautiful fishing and crabbing jetty, has two supermarkets, camping and fishing specialty shop (which is not that expensive, at least cheaper than Streaky Bay) and handful of caravan parks. It attracted us to stay for 3 days at the Foreshore Caravan Park mainly due to the shopping we need to do (buying camping and fishing equipments) and the easy crabbing opportunity.


The caravan park is not big, but well managed and has good facilities like fish cleaning station (equipped with big pots for people to cook crabs), camp kitchen with gas BBQ, and sells bait as well. They also lease crab nets for free, the catch is that you just have to buy crab bait from them for $7. The camp & fishing shop beside Foodland supermarket sells crab net for $12 if you want to do crabbing very often =)
The caravan park manager said it’s really easy to catch crabs, just put the bait in the net (secured by a steel), chuck it into the water then pull out every 10mins. And you’ll have crabs!

We were so delighted when we heard that. We went crabbing in the morning, around 8.30am when the tide is still high. About half an hour later, still no crabs. Then slowly you will see the blue reflections, moving towards the net. Those are blue swimmer crabs. It’s really interesting as you can see them get into the net, and you pull the string up!


We managed to get five crabs~ That’s enough for our lunch now =PP
                                           White Southern Hairy Wombat – Cute little fella
After the crabbing, we went to Ceduna Wombat Rescue Homestead to see the rare White Wombat. The homestead is privately owned, and they put so much effort into rescuing and nurturing problematic wombats (such as bowel disorder or physical injuries caused by cars) back to normal. Then bring them back to zoos. There are three types of wombat: Common wombat, southern hairy wombat and the rare northern hairy nose wombat.They sleep in dark boxes in the homestead because they are used to live in burrows in the wild. The wombats will be let out to dig holes and play around in the garden certain time of the day.
One of the native animals of Australia, the wombats are like the koalas, sleeping about three quarter of its time a day. Their teeth look like squirrel.

The homestead is open for public visiting from 10.30am to 11.30am daily and receives voluntary donations.
The freshest crab we ever had, boil in seawater.


 Our dinner – Catch of the day Porridge with egg and ginger. YUMS~~
The day we left Ceduna, we took a stroll along the beach. We saw so many oyster shells on the beach~ Suspecting that it might be the right time for oyster season, we begin to hunt for the oysters~! We walk and walk, and finally manage to find one growing on the rocks. The oyster really disguised within the rocks and we have to look really carefully. Another hard part is to remove it from the rocks. Gosh. . . Luckily we bought an oyster chucker, makes it bit easier. Sometimes we can only open the top shell, so the only way is to eat it right away, from the rocks with seawater in it! Eventually we got these . . .

A group of aboriginals past by and were curious on what we are doing (trying to open the shells). They offer to help out. They did open the oyster but then dropped it onto the floor >.< Then one of them who knows how to speak Mandarin (Ni hao ma? ) asked for two dollars, to buy some drinks. Eventually we give it to them. =.=
That two dollars = a picture with the aboriginals from Yalata Community.

Enjoyed them with Tabasco sauce and squeezed lemon =)


SO FRESH

2 comments:

  1. fresh oysters out from the sea...
    u guys really have good pairs of eyes ^.*

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. yea! really susah to get them out. and Peter got cuts on his hands trying to open the oysters. =P

      Delete

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