AusTour 18: Adelaide Day Two

After a less exciting and informational ride back to Adelaide I stored my luggage in the terminal (having to return later that night) for day two in Adelaide. The first stop I made, and one I had seen the day before was the Rundle Street mall. Here I counted no less that 3 clowns, at least 7 instrument performers (including a singer, harmonica-ist, two boys emphatically playing ‘pep-band’ songs on trumpets, and several guitarists), 1 free tattoo lady [i was tempted...], 2 people on huge balls, and a couple of other people I cant remember right now. Rundle Street mall is a pedestrian only section of Rundle Street with more shops than your dog has fleas. Following that I walked up to the Adelaide oval for an actual tour. The old man who led it, dressed to the nines (or perhaps the eights) in a uniform you would probably expect from the turn of the century (20th that is) was fairly informative about the history of the oval and its specific significance in cricket history (host of the ashes in 1884 where England won!) as well as some of the major players after whom the stands had been named. We got to go out onto the oval grass (pretty cool) but the most impressive part was going inside the traditionally kept and still operable scoreboard. It’s a fairly mammoth task of operating this monster, and required at least 4 men on a good day.Following the oval tour I went down to the Adelaide art museum. Mostly this was to see some of their Aboriginal Art (Again for my essay), but I also spent some time in their more classical art of which they have a lot. For free entry it was good just walk quickly through the fairly sizable rooms for a quick glance at the art. As five o’clock neared again and everything in Adelaide began to shut down I headed down through Adelaide Uni to the banks of the Torrens. I sat for a while on the quite banks of the river, watching the ducks, rowers and sun sinking in the sky.
As the day drew to a close I grabbed dinner before heading back to the bus terminal for my bus back to Melbourne to end the trip. It was an overnight bus getting into Melbourne at 6:30 in the morning. It was good to be back in Melbourne, a city that is now incredibly familiar to me, but it was also nice to be away from it. Somehow I managed to get from Southern Cross station to my apartment without a single tram passing in my direction, a 30 minute walk.

AusTour 16: Adelaide Day One

As my first day in Adelaide dawned I decided I was going to follow the walking tour in the Lonely Planet book. We’d followed the one previously in Brisbane and it turned out alright (apart for being tired at the end). I headed north towards the start the botanical gardens and National Wine Centre. At some point I decided I didn’t want to do the tour because it had left out some of the places I wanted to see, so I used it as a rough guide before departing from it completely. My first stop was the Nation Wine Centre; Adelaide and South Australia are where a lot of Australia’s wine is produced (this and the Yarra Valley in Victoria), so I thought it an apt stop. The ‘museum’ was fairly generic and uninformative, the entrance rises above an open cellar and it was absolutely packed with wines of all kinds which was kind of interesting. From the Wine Centre I entered the botanical gardens. Adelaide’s botanical gardens are (smartly) split into two parts the actual gardens with plants of every kind for all over the world and, what most Aussies use Botanical Gardens for, the Botanic Park. The dichotomy allows the plants to grow and be admired and allows a place for Aussies to play and relax on weekends and days off (all the other botanical gardens I’ve seen in Australia mix the two). I walked through the rose garden, a symmetrical walk garden and past a pretty good replication of a Mediterranean house and garden and out past the zoo. The zoo was on my list of ‘maybes’ but looked uninviting from the road so I skipped it for now and continues over the Torrens into North Adelaide. Here I stopped quickly at St Peters cathedral where I was told pretty enthusiastically about their new stained glass windows that apparently represent Australia and its history. My next stop was the Adelaide Oval, I had planned to take a tour there and luckily the afternoon tours would start in the next couple of days. A stayed for a bit (the oval is part of Adelaide parks so you can just walk in) and watched the grounds men converting the footy pitch to a cricket ground. Following the oval I walked back into the CBD towards Tandanya an aboriginal Art museum (at that point I had to write a paper on indigenous Australia art for one of my Uni classes). The museum was showing aboriginal weaving at the time, which was fairly interesting and different from the painting traditionally associated with aboriginal art. With the working day closing I finished off my main attractions for the day in the Adelaide museum. The museum was fairly disorganized; there was no narrative just a show and tell performance. It was funny though seeing some of the North American animals in the mammal’s exhibit—mammals like the black bear which I see all too much off. As the museum closed I went up to Lights Vision which I believe is the highest natural point in the inner city with a view out onto the CBD. There was one thing left to do that day and that was to find dinner which was little problem, what was a problem was finding ice-cream anywhere in Adelaide—I mean proper ice-cream, the homemade stuff not the generically produced. Adelaide for one reason or another is completely devoid of ice-cream. I went back to My Place for the night and talked to some cool people about Kangaroo Island (where I would go the next day) and life in general. I had to go to sleep early because the bus left at 6:45. Yay.