Adelaide

5th February 2010 Our last job in our little yellow peril was to drop Andy at the station early on Friday morning. After 3 days and over 1000kms it seems strange for it to be just the two of us again, but I’m sure we’ll catch up with Andy again at some point, even if its when we’re all back in the UK. After returning the car in central Adelaide, we took a free walking tour around the CBD. This started at the tourist centre on the main shopping street, Rundle Mall. Our guide, Bernie turned out to be a Gog (or a person from North Wales for the non-welsh people). He’d been in Oz for about 50 years though so only the odd hint of an accent remained. ...

6th February 2010 Like most of Australia’s cities, Adelaide has a Botanic Garden. Opened in 1857, the lovely gardens boast ponds, fountains, wisteria arbours, statues and heritage buildngs just like a clasic English-style garden, but with plenty of native trees too. This is where our Saturday began, with one of the free walking tours of the gardens. Our guide started by walking through the Australian bush section of the gardens pointing out interesting plants used by the Aborigines for various medicinal and food purposes. The Australian forest in these gardens is actually an example of sub-tropical bush from further north than Adelaide, which has very dry bushland which doesn’t require a lot of water. This forest actually needs to be watered because it comes from areas of Australia where they have a higher annual rainfall. ...

7th & 8th February 2010 The last time I visited Australia ten years ago, I elected to do an outback tour from Adelaide to Alice Springs via Coober Pedy instead of taking the Ghan. While I don’t regret this decision for a moment, I’ve always still wanted to take one of Australia’s most famous journeys. In the end, it has worked out for the best because ten years ago, I would only have been able to get as far as Alice as the last section of the Ghan from Alice to Darwin has only been completed in 2004. So finally, we’re taking this epic journey on the longest north to south railway line in the world. ...

4th February 2010 We’ve had two lovely warm days of clear blue skies but this morning we woke up to rain. From Robe, the highway once again turns inland where for miles and miles we pass more scrubland and not much else apart from a giant lobster on the side of the road at Kingston SE and a couple of inquisitive kangaroos. ...

1st February 2010 When we bought our tickets for the IMAX, we got some reduced price tickets for the Melbourne Museum at the same time so this morning we decided to check it out. The museum is housed in a modern building, full of natural light across a wide open plaza from the Royal Exhibition Building. The first thing you see as you enter the museum is the skeleton of a junior blue pigmy whale, the largest living mammal on the planet, right next to this is a pair of 12 metre long pythons. We continued towards the Wild exhibition through the dinosaur walk, charting the lives of the various dinosaurs right up to the Australian megafauna, thought to be the distant relatives of todays crocodiles. ...