MANNUM AND SURROUNDS

Over the next few days we took day trips to view the surrounding area, which included the beautiful and historic town of Hahndorf, established by Prussian Lutherans escaping religious persecution in 1839.
54 families brought to Australia by Captain Hahn on the ship Zebra - hence Hahndorf. Other nationalities came over the years and it is now a thriving and colourful community.
A visit to Victor Harbour was high on our list, we took the long route through grain growing areas, noticing a lot of very old abandoned tumbledown, stone built houses, (one had a tree growing through it) and the family's later built house elsewhere on the property.
It is a pretty harbourside town, unfortunately the horse drawn tram along the jetty was not in operation so we walked around, checking out the township and taking photos.
We had lunch at Port Elliot and checked out Horseshoe Bay, more photos, returning to Mannum via a different route.
We took our inflatable canoe to Walker Flat, crossing The Mighty Murray on ferries twice.
There are eleven such ferries all provided by the government.
It was a great paddle, lasting about an hour as the sun was high and hot, a new experience as we gazed at those mighty cliffs and the birds flitting to and from their nests in the rock flace.
We've been told that the height of the river is a metre higher at the moment, due to the rain coming down from Queensland and New South Wales.
We learned that the town of Mannum was isolated for a period of 5 months during the highest flooding which occurred in 1956 and that the local hotel moved the bar upstairs to its second storey and removed a section of railing allowing people to visit by rowboat!
Mannum is the birthplace of the Murray River paddle-steamers and has a museum containing a historic dry dock, a restored 114 year old working paddle steamer, available for charter, and we loved exploring it all.