Adelaide, South Australia

There’s not much trouble to find in Adelaide.  But there are plenty of places to repent should you be lucky enough to find some trouble to get into in Adelaide.  There are a lot of churches in Adelaide; there’s nearly one on every block.   The city is surrounded on all sides by parks.  Some of them are nice to wander through, others not so much.  Like Sydney, Melbourne, and Hobart, there are parks within the city as well.  These inner city parks are nice to stroll through, especially the park that is along the Torrens River.  The Torrens River runs through Adelaide, separating Adelaide from North Adelaide.  Being the capital city of South Australia, it is a big city but still has a small town feel to it.  Adelaide does have the distinction of hosting the largest arts festival in the Southern Hemisphere and hosting the only two Giant Pandas in the Southern Hemisphere.

The Adelaide Fringe Festival is a three week arts festival with events all over the city.  All kinds of artists are featured – writers, actors, musicians, comedians, circus/street performers, magicians.  The opening night was on Friday and a parade and concert was scheduled.  However, due to the nonstop rain that fell on Friday the parade was cancelled, but the concerts went on without interruption.  The concerts went from 8.00pm to 1.00am, which I think was the first time something in Australia stayed open past 5.00pm.  Normally all the shops and stores, even some restaurants, close for the day at 5.00pm, 6.30 at the latest.

The Adelaide Zoo, like Adelaide itself, is a small zoo but it has a lot to see.  It has a really nice collection of birds, which I particularly liked.  It had birds of varying sizes, shapes, colors, and regions of the world.  In the Aussie animals section there was a Tasmanian devil that was up and about running around its enclosure.  It even went for a swim.  To see a Tasmanian devil so alive and active was a stark contrast to the Tasmanian devil I saw in Hobart.  I was lucky enough to see the Giant Pandas awake and active as well.  Since the pandas eat such a low energy diet they spent up to twenty hours a day sleeping, but one was eating and the other was walking around its enclosure when I was there.  Pandas definitely rival koalas in the cuteness factor.  Koalas may have the lead due to their smaller size.

Speaking of koalas, I took a thirty minute train ride out to Belair National Park today and saw several koalas.  All the koalas I saw were sleeping in the nooks of eucalypt trees.  The first one I saw was sleeping with its back to me, but I was determined to get a good picture of him.  So I went off trail and over a dry creek bed to see the front of him.  I apparently made a bit too much noise for the koala because I woke him up.  You know that look someone gives you when you wake them up and they have no idea who you are, what you are doing there, or why you are waking them up?  Well, that’s the look the koala gave me.  After snapping many photos of the koala (I wasn’t sure if I’d see another one or not and I wanted to get my koala fix), I moved on and let him go back to his slumber.  I didn’t have that problem with the other koalas I saw, they were either too far or too high (in the tree, that is) to worry about or they were facing me.  Belair also housed many rosellas and lorikeets.  They are beautiful parrots with vibrant colors and they are quite chatty.  I came across what I believe are to be the smartest kangaroos in Australia.  I saw about a half dozen kangaroos today and all of them did the exact same thing:  they would hop across the trail in front of you, stop, and turn to look at you.  Next they would wait for you to reach for you camera.  Just when you had the camera nearly out of its case they would jump away into the woods.  I swear I could hear them laughing as they hopped away.

Tomorrow starts my whirlwind tour of the East coast.  I fly from Adelaide to Cairns tomorrow and will travel about 1600 miles in two weeks to end up in Sydney in time to catch my return flight home.  Along the way I will be stopping to go a cruise in the Great Barrier Reef, do some hiking on Fraser Island, and go to the Australia Zoo.