Advertisement
Aboriginal Caves
This was to be our last day on this particular tour, as it was a new one that started after we got to Adelaide. Because of this, we were going to be saying goodbye to all but one of our group as most were making their own way to Melbourne or had different things planned.
Leaving Parachilna, it was some more bumpy road time before stopping at Yourambulla Caves near Hawker to look at some Aboriginal paintings. It was only a short hike up to these and it was pretty amazing how well preserved the site was. The paintings themselves were a lot clearer than those at Uluru and with a board which translated some of the symbols, it made quite a bit more sense. It was still pretty mystifying, as although it alluded to water holes, kangeroo and emu tracks, there was little detail on how the information was to be used. It may have been a map of some sort to help navigate the local area, details on the path a particular tribe had taken or perhaps just a basic teaching tool. There was no way to definitively date it either, although they reckon it's around
10,000 years old. Pretty cool stuff.
We didn't stay too long there and it was back to more bus time as we headed to Clare, a town in an area known as Clare Valley home to a lot of Australian wines.
Wine Tasting...Again
We had our lunch here and used up the last of our food before heading over to a Cellar Door wine tasting building to sample some of the local wines. We had to pay a nominal $5 charge, but got about 8 wine samples as well as some of their local beer (the place doubles as a brewery). Due to some people not appreciating some of the red wine and the beer itself, I may have got more than my fair share, although it certainly wasn't something I was complaining about.
It reminded us of our wine tours and made us want to hit the other wineries nearby, but time was ticking so we headed back to the bus for the final trip: Clare to Adelaide. It was only a couple of hours long so we made it into Adelaide late afternoon and were dropped off at our hostel, the YHA. We had
two nights here free as part of our tour package so it was good to get to a city to chill out again and actually get some phone reception! Overall, we had clocked up around 3,000kms since leaving Alice Springs, which amounted to a lot of bus time and very impressive for 6 days.
Adelaide
After freshening up at our nice hostel (the nicest we've ever stayed at!), we headed out for our group's last hurrah. It was dinner at a Malaysian restaurant called "A Taste Of Spice" located in Adelaide's Chinatown. The place was suprisingly cheap and the food itself very tasty and Emma got some of her favourite Singapore Rice Noodles. We were going to go out afterwards, but we ended up just heading back to the hostel as Emma didn't feel too great. It was a bit of a relief to be honest, as neither of us felt like going "out out" and spending money we didn't have on alcoholic beverages. We came back to the hostel finding the whole dorm to ourselves, so we knew we'd be able to get a long lie the next morning.
And a long lie we had! It
felt weird getting up in late morning again, although we did wake up at 7am because of our body clocks. After getting stuff together, we went into the city centre and checked out the sights of Adelaide after a nice brunch. The place itself is pretty nice and quite compact with most of the sights located centrally. The main exception is the seaside area of Glenelg, although the prospect of going there wasn't too appealing. It was actually pretty hot though considering Adelaide is one of the colder parts of Australia, I think we were lucky. Wandering about, we ended up at the Migrants Museum, which was probably one of the most interesting museums we've been to on our trip.
It basically charted the history of Australia through the people itself, starting off the earliest white settlers. South Australia was the only "free colony" (ie the only state not established for a penal colony) and the government tried hard to convince people to come over initially. The ideal candidates were English and Scottish (trying to keep it all British I think) white skilled males and reading about some of their recruitment campaigns were amusing. It also explored the early
relationships with Aboriginals and how the communities interacted, as well as more recent history on the problems that the settlements caused for them.
One of the funniest parts of it was that if an immigrant didn't speak English, they may have been administered a dialect test deliberately chosen in a different language to avoid barring someone entry purely based on ethnicity, with the example given being Scottish Gaelic. Something I would have definitely failed anyway. It also had details about more recent immigrants to Australia, particularly in post-war years with Europeans and Asians arriving en masse (they realised they couldn't sustain the economy with purely British immigrants) and it had some interesting first person accounts. It concluded with the fact that South Australia is actually still reallyneeding to get more migrant labour to help sustain the economy, so if anyone wishes to emigrate over here, you'll know where to come. Indeed, it's far easier to get a Visa in South Australia than any other Australian state, so they obviously are actively encouraging it.
We headed back into town to buy a few provisions for our trip the next day and then back to the hostel to catch up
on things on the internet before heading to bed for some sleep in preperation for yet another 5am start...
Advertisement
Tot: 0.091s; Tpl: 0.016s; cc: 9; qc: 23; dbt: 0.0517s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb