Radelaide

March 2nd/3rd/4th - Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

The night we got back from The Rock Tour, everyone from the trip met at a bar in town and had dinner and drinks. Everyone in the bar was really friendly and we met loads of new people. Needless to say it was quite a big night! We woke the next morning with considerable hangovers and the challenge of packing, getting to the airport and catching our flight to Adelaide.

We flew with Qantas and it was a really nice flight, although all we saw was red desert below us for 4 hours.

Arriving in Adelaide it was immediately different from the Northern Territory. It felt more like England, even down to the grey skies and much cooler temperatures. We got a taxi from the airport to our AirBnB place in a suburb of Adelaide called Prospect. We were staying with a lady in her 50s called Cynny and she was lovely. She also had a young French couple staying with her who were in Australia learning English, and a Scottish man called Eric who was in Adelaide busking at their Fringe Festival. She made us feel very welcome and cooked a lovely dinner for us all so we all sat round eating and chatting until quite late. It was really nice to talk to someone who had lived there for a long time and hear about Australia, and also to talk to others and hear their experiences and plans. Cynny was adamant that Adelaide was the best place to live in Australia and informed us that the locals refer to it as Radelaide because it's so cool!!

After a great night's sleep we walked into town via a travel clinic so Mike could get his last Rabies vaccine. The architecture was really pretty with lots of Victorian buildings, and the climate was much more tolerable - much less humid and cooler, but still bright and sunny; Cynny said that it had been known to snow occasionally in winter. There were loads of little cafes and places to eat and drink in the suburbs and lots of green spaces in the city centre. In one of the gardens near the river there was a literary festival going on and there were guest speakers and a book shop; unfortunately they were all Australian and we didn't know who any of them were!

We basically just spent all day wandering around the city. There was the main shopping street with malls and buskers outside, the university and hospital, the river and the surrounding parks, the Oval.
We spent some time in the Migration Museum which was really interesting - it told of how the immigration rules had changed over time, from the early settlers and their difficulties with the land and their treatment of Aborigines, to more modern times with 'Ten Pound Poms'. It was pretty honest with regards to the poor treatment of the Aborigines and also told of how during the 1950s/60s they gave unfair language tests to people wanting to migrate there - for example, they would ask a Chinese person to take an English test in Hungarian and they would then be denied entry because they would inevitably fail the test.

Downtown Adelaide

The University

The University

A Victorian arcade

For lunch we had a burrito and sat outside watching the world pass by! We then just wandered back by the river to where we were staying.

The Oval

The river

Where we stayed

Although there isn't much to do there, Adelaide is a beautiful, relaxed city and one that we could live in if we had to! It also showed us a bit of Australian life as we had imagined it before coming - the school kids going off with their wide-brimmed sun hats on, school sports out on the river, people leaving their houses unlocked and only closing the front gate of the house so that a breeze can constantly flow through. It felt like a bit of a sleepy city, and it seemed to have quite an elderly population, but it was chilled and felt very safe. 

If you have more time you can go and explore the vineyards and do wine tours - the lady we stayed with was very passionate about the quality of South Australian wine!

The next day we struggled across town on a bus, during rush hour, with all our worldly belongings on our back, to pick up our campervan. And so began our roadtrip...