Adelaide – We loved it!
Our stay in Adelaide was much too short to enjoy the superb style and openness of the city. From the basic layout of the place, through beautifully preserved civic buildings from early Victorian times, the huge amount of green space, the Torrens River and the University campus Adelaide has it all and won’t fail to impress any visitor.
The Rundle shopping area alone is enough to satisfy any desire for extended retail therapy, galleries and arcades run at right angles to the main street, extending the shopping areas while giving a very pleasing impression of depth and height.
We were impressed, probably more than with any of the other OZ cities that we’ve visited on this trip. This is not to decry or negate the other places; each has strengths and weaknesses – who could dismiss the grandeur of Sydney Harbour, the quality and civic amenity of the boardwalk at Cairns or the shade and peace of the verdant parks of Melbourne – it’s just that Adelaide does everything so nicely, in such a civilised manner.
As an example, we spent a couple of hours watching the Christmas Pageant, lots and lots of decorated and themed floats with clowns, marching bands, and the finale piece of Santa and his reindeer. The main part of the city was closed to traffic for the morning and huge numbers of kids were there, making chalk pictures on the road, having a great time while waiting for the show to start.
The images are here, the first photos in the sequence are from our short trip on a Murray River paddle boat – shades of ‘The Thorn Birds’. Of the remainder, some are from the pageant and the remainder are from tour that we made around the city, including a trip on the river. The Koalas were spotted during an out of town jaunt up to Hansdorf, the first German-speaking town in South Australia, they were in gum trees on the roadside and seemed blissfully unaware of our presence!