“The motel's hallway carpet has a pattern that looks exactly like the aerial view of Blue Lake — and I'm almost certain nobody planned it that way.”

Commercial Street East is the kind of road that sounds busier than it is. You drive in from the Princes Highway expecting a petrol station and a pie shop, and you get both, but also a town that feels like it's been quietly getting its act together while nobody from the eastern capitals was paying attention. Mount Gambier sits on top of an extinct volcano — a fact that sounds dramatic until you're here and it just looks like a normal regional centre with unusually good coffee and a sinkhole garden that could pass for something out of a Miyazaki film. I pull in around four in the afternoon, the light already going amber on the limestone facades, and the Best Western Southgate is right there on the main drag, no searching required, no U-turn into a gravel lane. It's the kind of arrival where you think: right, this is going to be straightforward. And straightforward, in road-trip terms, is a compliment.

The town smells faintly of pine plantation and something mineral — the volcanic soil, maybe, or the imagination doing overtime after reading too many geological plaques on the drive in. A couple walks past with a kelpie. The pub across the road has a specials board already out. Mount Gambier doesn't perform for visitors. It just continues being itself, which is a town of about 30,000 people who happen to live inside a volcanic complex and seem remarkably unbothered by it.

A motel that stays out of your way

The Southgate does the thing that the best regional motels do: it gives you a clean, well-maintained room and then gets out of your way so you can go explore the town. The reception area is small, staffed by someone who actually lives here and can tell you that the Umpherston Sinkhole is best visited at dusk when the possums come out. This is better than any concierge service I've encountered in hotels charging five times the rate.

The room is ground-floor, drive-up style — you park directly outside your door, which matters when you've packed the way I pack, which is badly. Inside, the bed is firm without being punishing, the kind where you lie down and think, this will do nicely, and then wake up eight hours later surprised you didn't stir. The linen is white and genuinely clean, not just clean-looking. There's a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall, a small desk, a kettle with actual brand-name tea bags rather than the anonymous brown sachets that haunt lesser motels. The bathroom has decent water pressure and the hot water arrives in under thirty seconds, which I note because I've stayed in places three postcodes fancier where it didn't.

The walls are not thick. You will hear your neighbour's TV if they're watching the footy at volume. But this is a motel on a main road in a regional town — if you wanted monastic silence, you've miscalibrated your expectations. I put in earbuds, listened to a podcast about cave diving in the region's sinkholes, and fell asleep wondering whether the water table beneath me was actually blue or whether that's just a trick of depth and light. (It's both, apparently.)

“Mount Gambier doesn't perform for visitors. It just continues being itself, which is a town of 30,000 people who happen to live inside a volcanic complex and seem remarkably unbothered by it.”

What the Southgate gets right is location as utility. Walk five minutes east and you're at the Main Corner complex — the town's cultural hub, with a gallery, a café, and a visitor centre that hands out genuinely useful maps. Drive three minutes and you're at the Blue Lake, which between November and March turns a shade of cobalt so absurd that first-time visitors assume their phone camera is malfunctioning. The motel's position on Commercial Street East means you're also within striking distance of the Thai Orchid for dinner or the Metro Bakery for a morning vanilla slice that has no business being as good as it is.

The Wi-Fi works. I'll say that plainly because in regional Australian accommodation, functional Wi-Fi remains an achievement worth documenting. It's not fast enough to stream 4K, but it handles emails, maps, and the inevitable late-night scroll through photos of sinkholes you took that afternoon. The room also has reverse-cycle air conditioning that actually responds to the remote, which in a South Australian summer is not a luxury but a survival mechanism. There's a small swimming pool on site — nothing resort-grade, but enough to cool down after a day of crater-hopping.

Walking out into the morning

Morning in Mount Gambier is quieter than you'd expect from a town this size. The trucks haven't started yet on Commercial Street. A magpie is doing something territorial on the motel's front lawn. The limestone buildings catch the early light differently than they did at dusk — warmer, softer, like the whole town is still deciding whether to wake up.

I drive to the Blue Lake one more time before leaving, because someone at the Metro Bakery told me the colour shifts with the angle of the sun and she was right. If you're heading toward the Twelve Apostles or up to Adelaide, Mount Gambier is the stop you didn't know you needed. Not for the motel. For the crater you're standing inside without realising it.

Rooms at the Best Western Southgate start around 92 USD a night for a standard queen — roughly the cost of two decent dinners in town, which puts it firmly in the category of sensible rather than splashy. For what you get — a solid room, a real location, and a base for one of regional Australia's most underappreciated towns — it earns its keep without trying to be anything more.