Botanic-Gardens

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. ...

3rd January 2010 Drizzle heralded the start to today, so we abandoned plans to go to Manly on the ferry and headed for the Opera House via Circular Quay instead. By the time we reached Circular Quay the weather had brightened a bit and some of the street performers were starting to get going, including an Aboriginal guy playing the digeridoo and posing for photos at the same time! ...

12th December Happy Birthday Dad! We’ve spent quite a bit of time driving around Christchurch between picking up the campervan over two weeks ago, then arriving back Thursday night and dropping the van back on Friday, but we haven’t really had the opportunity to explore the city itself. Our hostel is just a short walk from Hagley Park and the Botanic Gardens, so this seemed like the ideal place to start our wanderings. It was a beautiful day with clear blue skies and we thoroughly enjoyed strolling through the gardens which in parts seemed more like a large park with wide open areas as well as the formal gardens such as the rose garden. ...

7th December 2009 After the relative and glorious wilderness of the Catlins we were looking forward to getting back to civilisation in the shape of the South Island’s second largest city, Dunedin. On our arrival mid-morning we discovered a delightful, compact town centre shaped as a octagon with some wonderfully preserved old buildings. We didn’t really know where to start so we headed for the city’s I-Site where we were able to book a one hour historical walking tour of the city. This seemed like the best and quickest way for us to get our bearings, while learning about the grand old sites surrounding us. ...

20th November 2009 Wellington is quite a compact city, not unlike Cardiff. After a wander around the centre this morning to find the information centre and some internet access, we took the city’s historic Cable Car up to the beautiful Botanic Gardens which overlook the harbour. The Botanic Gardens cover 25 hectares and are a unique landscape of protective native forest, exotic trees, plant collections and seasonal displays. We arrived at the top and took in the view over the central business district from the Cable Car station, before making our way to the Cable Car museum. This small museum details the history of the cable cars that have transported people between the harbour and hills in Wellington for over 100 years. It also has a fully restored original cable car known as a ‘relentless red rattler’ and a fully restored grip car. It also showed examples of private cable cars that people use to get to their homes on the hills. ...