Flinders Ranges to Adelaide

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Sam came across to wake us all early today, in fact so early that it was still completely dark and the stars were all still shining bright in the sky – Jo took this as a positive thinking that at least we get more time to admire the starry sky, whilst the boys thought they would just be happy with a little more sleep! We packed up our swags and our sleeping bags whilst Sam and Nev cooked up bacon and eggs sandwiches for breakfast. We were all packed up and back on the bus by 7am and we were on our way to Alligator Gorge in the Flingers Range Mountains where we were taking a walk through the valley. We had to stop and detach the trailer from the van on the way to the gorge as we needed to lose some weight in order to make it up the hills.Along the way we had to make several swerves to avoid the Yuros (small kangaroos) who were happily sitting on thewinding roads infront of our bus!

There are no alligators in the gorge – local folklore suggests that the name came from the guy who discovered the gorge whose name was apparently Mr A. Gator. It sounds to us like someone has played a Bart Simpson style trick on the locals, but believe from that what you like!

The walk through the gorge was just what was needed to clear some heads of the beer from the night before and work off our bacon & eggs breakfast. There are a lot of Kangaroos in the Flinders Ranges and we saw quite a few on our walk. We also saw one who had died making an ill judged attempt to jump from one side of the gorge to the other – the smell was terrible!

After the walk it was back on the bus for a drive through the Flinders Ranges to the Clare Valley, where we stopped in Clare town for some lunch. For lunch today we learnt how to make sushi – some more successfully than others, whilst Sam and Nev changed a flat tyre which we had picked up on the drive. The Clare Valley is a wine making area, and after lunch Sam set up a wine tasting session at Taylors, one of the larger wine makers in the area. The ground of Taylors were beautiful and the building itself was in the style of a French Chateau. The winemaker kindly talked us through around 8 tastings as we learnt a bit more about the local grape varieties of Reisling, Cabernet and Shiraz.. Unsurprisingly, we all agreed that we preferred the $80 bottles to the $20 bottles!

It was then time to make our way in to Adelaide, where the bus dropped us off at our hostel. There was another of the girls from the tour who was also staying at our hostel, so we arranged to meet for dinner later and checked in to our rooms. We were all glad to find that the showers were powerful after a night sleeping in the bush!

We walked over to the Chinatown area of the city to find a place for dinner and chose one of the smaller restaurants which had a few people queuing for tables outside. We had a 10 minute wait for a table, so we used the time wisely and headed over to the bottle-o to get a couple of bottles of wine to go with our dinner. We bumped into Nev from our tour, who was just leaving the same restaurant as we sat down, so we agreed to meet up for a drink in one of the nearby bars after dinner. The food was tasty but the service was slow, so we were a little later than planned meeting Nev for a drink. After a couple of beers with Nev we were all ready to hit the sack as Mark and Toby had an early flight to catch to Sydney, whilst we had plenty of washing & blogging to catch up with the next day!

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