Adelaide

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On arrival in Adelaide, I discovered that the Ashes were being held there, as well as a Guns N Roses concert. This unsurprisingly made finding accomodation fairly hard work, though eventually I found a hostel with 1 bed left. I spent the first day looking around the city, and doing boring things like applying for a Thai visa. My second day was quite a lot more interesting, as I went down to Glenelg. It was very sunny and so I spent the morning swimming and jumping off the pier with some surfer guys. Then as the tide came in and the sun started to get blocked out by clouds, we headed back to the beach, where I found a skim board being tossed about in the waves. I asked around, but as noone appeared to own it, I took it back to the hostel.

The next day I went over to the entertainment centre, which was very dull and there wasn't anything happening apart from cricket, which does not qualify as entertaining. So instead, I spent the day going round the various free things in the city, including a tour of the chocolate factory and an opal mine which were quite interesting.

On Saturday, Anne, a Finnish girl in my dorm wanted to learn to skim board so we headed down to Glenelg. We started off in a pool of water left by the dropping tide, and spent about an hour attempting to skimboard, and taking photos of each other. By that time the tide was low enough to go in the waves to do it, and as it was a fairly cloudy day, there was only 2 other people on the beach, so we had lots of space to fall over. After a while, we got bored, and I tried using it as a bodyboard which didn't really work, and we went back to the city to find some food. That evening we walked over to the moonlight cinema to see SALT, which was pretty cool as we were laying on the grass under the stars to watch the film. Unfortunately it became cool in a much more literal sense half way through the movie when it started to rain, but it was still a fairly good evening.

The next day I caught the bus over to Port Adelaide, and ended up in Semaphore, which is a very boring village, with a pier, and some shops and not much else. At the end of the pier there was a load of fishermen, fish heads all over the floor and some kids with some massive crabs in the bottom. I also met a guy called Daniel who was at least 25, though he claimed to be 19. He was also totally oblivious to sarcasm, and when I told him of course, having just turned down weed, speed and mushrooms, I would love to try E, he proceeded to get out a bag of tablets and invite me back to his house. Needless to say I didn't hang around with him much longer. Instead, I got the train to Port Adelaide (getting off at the right stop this time). Once there I went on a $5 2 hour dolphin spotting tour, although we didn't see any dolphins. Then I went round the markets, which sold an immense amount of crap, from old swords to plastic babies, before going back to the city for the night.

For my final day in Adelaide, me and Anne got the bus out to Cleland Wildlife Park. Halfway there we got off the bus to look at the view from Lofty point, whilst the driver made a phone call as there had been a crash on the road ahead of us. In the end he decided to try and get past, so we started off down the narrow winding road. We came to the crash after one very tight corner. There was a massive lorry on the outside of the bend, stopped next to the steep drop, and a car in the inside which had obviously taken the bend to wide/fast as it had crashed headlong into the cliff. We managed to get past the police, and fire engines ok, but getting past the lorry/car was a bit tight - we were about 5mm away from the lorry, and I think we did scrape the car, though it was so crumpled up from having driven into the cliff, I doubt the owner would've cared.

The wildlife park turned out to be really good. We got to stroke a Koala called Osmond, and feed it gum leaves. Then we fed and stroked a few wallabies and kangaroos, before going to the Dingo enclosure. After that, we went to the water-birds lake, where some kindof goose-type animal tried to eat my foot, and Anne ran away screaming. Then we had to walk through a massive open field with loads of kangaroos in it, to get to the next enclosures. We stopped off for a while to feed them, and saw a mother kangaroo with a tiny joey in her pouch, then we discovered some nasty stinging ants crawling on our feet, and left quite quickly to see the echinidas and wombats - which were way bigger than I thought they'd be. We finished off by feeding a little bandicoot that was running around on the path.

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