Days 15 and 16 – Adelaide

After we’d recovered from the fact that we were camping in Hackney (Adelaide was obviously settled by a big group of East Londoners, because they’ve got Hackney, Mile End, Stepney etc. as suburbs – all shitty areas of London!) Adelaide proved to be a really nice city.

We wondered round Central Market and stuffed ourselves with lots of funky specialist food, wandered around the impressive botanical gardens, visited the aboriginal art centre they have there (where I bought a new bag for my pipe and tobacco – tres exciting!). A wander around the city revealed more of an old-style charm to it than other large towns in Australia, although the main shopping plaza felt thoroughly English which was strange. There’s a strong presence of public art all around the city.

It’s a real shame that we didn’t get more time to stay here – we kind of wish we’d skipped Melbourne now and come here instead in one sense. It’s making us think of doing things very differently on our trip to New Zealand which we’re planning for this time next year. It would have been nice to have been in Melbourne and then moved here after just a few months for a few more months. Anyway, thoughts are slow-cooking for travel plans in 2010 as a result of finding somewhere that we might have preferred….

A bizarre but welcome change was the opportunity to actually use our legs! After 2 weeks in a car for most of the day, you get this feeling that your legs are beginning to atrophy and then, BOOM!, all of a sudden your walking a few kilometres down to the city and back from the camping site. My goodness, I do have legs! So for 2 days we didn’t use the car – a welcome change since we were so used to walking everywhere in Melbourne.

~ by thesynapse on 19 February, 2009.