Rachel and Mike in Australia

We visited Australia’s 5th largest city a couple weeks ago.  Compared to Sydney, Adelaide feels tiny.  The inner city, which is 10 blocks by 15 blocks, is ringed on all sides by parkland, giving the impression of a small town that you can walk across with ease.  I never would have guessed that it is a town of 1.5 million people.  The only thing that suggested a large population was their central market.  It was a huge smorgasbord of fresh fruit, vegetables, meats, cheeses, nuts, and flowers.  There were a myriad of different types of sausages and a number of fruits we didn’t recognize.  We decided to try the dragon fruit, which has a sort of magenta flesh and an outer look of a succulent but an inner look of a hot pink kiwi.  It was quite yummy!

If you travel basically in any direction outside of Adelaide town center, you hit wine country.  To the south there’s McLaren Vale known for its reds, to the east the rolling Adelaide Hills for ‘cool climate wines’, and to the north the Barossa Valley, which is Australia’s best-known wine region where many a Shiraz is produced.  We drove up to the Adelaide Hills to a small town called Hahndorf.  Hahndorf was settled by German immigrants in 1839 and still has a strong German influence.  The food was perfect for a cold winter day.  We had Hungarian goulash for lunch and for dinner a sausage platter (6 different kinds!) with Hofbrauhaus beer on tap.  It was delicious!  I wish I could say we burned off the calories with a nice afternoon hike in the hills…but the rainy and cold weather kept us to indoor activities—wine and cheese tasting to be precise.  We tasted several wines that have won Australian and international awards.  Though our palettes aren’t nearly as discerning as international wine judges, we had to agree that there were some really tasty wines.

We made a detour between vineyards to visit another Aussie Big Thing (We are now up to 13 total visited).  The Big Rocking Horse stands more or less in the middle of nowhere next to a wooden toys store.  I think the Big Thing strategy definitely works here.  We never would have stopped (let alone made a purposeful detour) if there wasn’t a Big Thing out front.  While we resisted buying any wooden toys (some of which were pretty cool), we did pay the $2/pp to climb the rocking horse and purchased a couple coffees at the conveniently attached cafe.  Not a bad Big Thing experience, though it would have been truly awesome if the Big Rocking Horse actually rocked.

We visited the Cleland Wildlife Park on our way back to Adelaide.  It’s a pretty big park and they have a huge array of Australian wildlife.  We saw a bunch of varieties of emus, ‘roos and wallabies.  They live in big enclosures that you can walk into and feed grass pellets to the animals.  It’s a pretty amazing opportunity to get a close-up view of these guys.  We had seen a lot of ‘roos during our drive cross country, but I still find them fascinating.  Their heads remind me so much of deers and their upper bodies have a very human-like look, but then looking at the tendons in their legs and their tails, they are like no other animal I know.

There were a number of other animals at the park that we had never seen before.  There were dingos, which it is thought were brought over to Austalia by sea about 4,000 years ago.  I was surprised to find out they are endangered in their pure-bred form.  I was also a bit amused to find out about the Dog Fence.  In the late 1800’s, the Aussie’s built the longest fence in the world (stretching over 3,000 mi) to protect southeastern Australia sheep herds from dingos.  The results were only partially successful.  There seem to be fewer dingos in southeastern Australia, but this has led to more rabbits and kangaroos that compete with the sheep for grazing vegetation.  I can’t help but smile at the Aussie spirit of trying to tame this wild land with really massive fences.

We got to see our first koalas.  For a couple hours every afternoon, they bring out koalas (on 30 minute shifts) so that people can get an up-close view of these animals that are so tough to see in the wild.  The koala was bigger than I expected, though I suppose the ones at the park are probably bigger than average since they have to work even less than normal koalas for their share of eucalytpus leaves.  I was also excited to see our first hairy-nosed wombats.  There’s no feeding these guys, and I dare say I wouldn’t want to run into one in a dark alley!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 11:39 pm and is filed under Creature Feature, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.