Penola and Naracoorte

Wednesday the 20th April

We left Mount Gambier about 9am. About 1hour later we arrived in a little town called Penola. (Careena had found a brochure in Mount Gambier tourist information centre about a Fantasy Railway in Penola and wanted to see it.)

The man who owned the railway was very friendly. He gave the kids quizzes and they had to find the answers around the railway to get a prize. He has spent 10 years building the railway and he still has more to do. Every time you looked at it something new would jump out at you. He had castles with little figurines  everywhere.








Naracoorte Caves
When we had seen enough of the railway we moved on to Naracoorte to look at the caves.
We did tours of 3 caves. The wet cave which was self guided, Alexander and Victoria Fossil Cave.

The caves formations were not as spectacular as some of the other caves we have been in e.g Wombeyan Caves in NSW but we decided to visit them because of the high fossil content that is found there.



Fossils found in the cave.



Fossil of a giant leaf eating Kangaroo.

A lot of the fossils that were found were of giant Mega fauna which are now extinct.
The animals fell into the caves from above through holes and they could not get out because there was no other openings.
There were over 100 deposits of fossils in the Victoria Fossil Cave which is approximately 4 km long. Our tour did 400 meters of that.
When we left the caves it was getting late so we decided to stop at Keith, (about  1 hour away  )for the night on our way to Mount Barker.