Advertisement
Published: November 4th 2008
It was love, a flurry of good feels from the moment we arrived, the city was all we wished for with a chilled and airy, free spirit buzz and home to Neighbours to top it off. I think it’s because we split our city stay and when we returned for the last few days it just felt like coming home, familiar sights and sounds, we didn’t have to work or stress, we knew this city, it was under our skin. We loved Melbourne and after a month in Victoria it was sad to say goodbye to the first really settling place since Brisbane.
Landing in Adelaide felt like an anti climax, perhaps because of the love of Melbourne, or the fact it really marked the beginning of the end, the penultimate destination. I think the biggest factor was probably prejudices, all the negative comments about the state and it’s city.
It took us a day or so to really understand the little place and then a real appreciation started to develop. I was glad firstly as this is our only stop off the ’backpackers East coast trail’, leading from Cairns to Melbourne it is the stereotypical over trodden track
covering all the ‘It’ places.
South Australia, the state, is the driest and most inhospitable place we‘ve been, home to just over 1.5 million, in the central coast lies Adelaide home to two thirds of the population. From the moment we arrived from the airport to the city you could feel the size difference. This was most likely exacerbated by coming from Australia second largest city, but we just had a feeling we wanted to just go ‘ahh isn’t it cute’.
One of the things to really strike home was the appreciation and respect that South Australia has for the Aboriginals, they are the best out of the four states we visited, notably notorious when it came to Aboriginal people was the state of Victoria.
We had one more day then we thought we did and as it wasn’t the biggest place we really had to restrain ourselves from exploring it too fast. We set out in the glorious sunshine, a lot more constant then Victoria and hotter as further north, once we had covered all the usual we headed to Adelaide’s famous chocolate factory. It was fun to read all about the process and watch the
people making and decorating the little chocs and then we got some free tasters, yum yum.
Saturday was a beach day, the sun in the sky and the temperature climbing to a massive 36 degrees. We caught the tram, there’s only one in Adelaide, and headed out to Glenelg. A true Brighton hip seaside town, a pier in the centre and everyone just chilaxing their weekend away.
On the Sunday we went to explore the street markets before heading off to the botanical gardens for a spot of lunch. All that should be green was a little brown, the water issues of the state are all around, there are big plans in the pipeline (every pun intended) as soon treated sea water will be pumped to top up supplies.
The afternoon took us down the north terrace of the city to the art galleries, museums and the immigration museum. It was really interesting reading both people’s stories of emigrating over the years and how the laws have changed over time to adjust the flow of immigrants. Supply and demand from ten pound pommes to the modern times with entry fee reflecting ’what you can bring’ status.
With lots to think about we, meandered, strolled and generally hung out in the city, just chilaxing our time away.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.116s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 7; qc: 45; dbt: 0.0871s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
