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Published: April 11th 2007
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Debbie and Horsey
Troy 2 is obviously on the way We arrived in Adelaide early sunday evening which is a bit of a pain when you need to do grocery shopping. Fortunately the chinese supermarket was open so it was singapore style chicken ball curry for tea. The next day we were up early for our Barossa valley "wine tasing" tour. We don't just taste wine we drink it! Our German guide Uwe was a bit of a chracter but a good guide who really seemed to know his stuff. I sat up front with him as there weren't 2 seats together free which meant some peace for Debbie. We visited 3 wineries / vinyards before lunch including Jacob's Creek. At each tasting we started with some whites, then rose, then reds and finished with port. The tour is for backpackers so the enthasis is on getting drunk. Most of us were by lunchtime so the Ozzie BBQ went down well. Some of the reads we tried were actually chilled, we don't really drinks reds that much but they were quite nice. We visited one more winery after lunch and were then took back to our hostel. That night we met up with Claire % Emer, two girls we met
on our outback tour. The next few days were spent wandering around Adelaide, shopping and swimming in the Olympic pool. Manchester's is better in my opinion.
For the next 4 nights over the Easter weekend we stayed south of Adelaide in Moanna with Mike and Julie (friends of Debbie's family). Debbie was hoping to meet up with their daughter Kirsty who had been Debbie's pen friend for years. Unfortunately, Kirsty is currently traveling around the UK on the other side of the World! Mike and Julie were really friendly, not only letting us stay, feeding us, etc but also taking us around to see some of the local sights and giving us our own personalised tours. Where they live is a really peaceful place only a few minutes from a beach (which is not full of tourists). On Good Friday we were drove around the coast and saw Kylie's favourite restaurant. On saturday we went to Victor Harbour and walked over to Granite Island and saw more of the surrounding regions which were sometime quite green even though South Australia is generally quite dry. On Sunday we visited Port Adelaide where Debbie & Julie went hunting for beswick (old
Moanna Beach
Very peaceful place. English pottery) in the market. Debbie obviously couldn't buy any so happily helped Julie buy some. After that we went on a river cruise and saw more dolphins.
We got back to the city the day before our Great Ocean Road tour to Melbourne as it was an early start and would be too far too get to from Moanna. I'd been trying to get hold of Ben (my sisters ex-boyfriend) since getting into Adelaide just to say hello. I managed to get in touch and we agreed to meet up for a quick drink but when we met up it turned into a bit of a session so we got back to the hostel 6 hours later. Fortunately we'd decided to meet up at 3pm so it still wasn't that late when we got back. It was kebabs all round for tea.
Despite the day's drinking we were still awake for our tour at 6am. The first day of our tour (with the same company as the outback one) was mostly a driving one with convenience stops on the way. We got to the grampians late afternoon to see from a viewpoint some of the forrests. You
Debbie at granite Island
You can walk over from the mainland. can also see how much damage was done by the large bush fires here about a year ago. Our guide for this tour was Jas, she was actually younger than us (man we're old) but we still had fun with her. The second day we started with a walk in the Grampions at a place called Grand Canyon (not the US one but still very impressive). After the walk we visited a cultural centre which was really interesting, the only problem was having just an hour to get around all of it. From there it was back on the road to see the 12 Apostles at sunset. They are a well known collection of huge rocks standing in the sea just off the coast. There's now only 8 left and apparently there were 20 around the 1800s). The following day we went to see london bridge (another rock formation that looks like a bridge), Lockard Gorge and then back to the 12 Apostles. We decided to go for the optional helicopter flight over them. This was our first helicopter flight, it was good fun, the views were amazing and the only way it could've been topped was with the Airwolf
theme blasting out of the speakers. The rest of the day we were on the Great Ocean Road with stops in Apollo bay and Torquay. Jas pointed out a lighthouse which was where "Round the twist" was filmed. Round the twist was a childrens tv show that both me and Debbie had watched. We didn't get that close to the lighthouse but we took some pictures anyway for nostalgia. We also saw some Koalas up in the trees on the road so we stopped to have a look. They were even moving which is pretty rare to see as they're usually quite lazy. We arrived in Melbourne in rush hour, it was a bit of a shock to the system after being in quite small places. Even Adelaide is a lot smaller than Melbourne so it took quite a while but we eventually got to our hostel.
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