Adelaide

Our hotel was on North Terrace, right in the middle of town, an older style hotel, fine for a few days. As in many other hotels their Internet policy was terrible one of the worst we found, A$ 0.62 per minute, 2hrs A$12.50, 24hrs A$ 24, walked down to Rundle Mall good speed unlimited free Wi-Fi at David Jones, what a surprise.

Next morning went on of a tour of Adelaide, took lots of pictures of monuments, Edward 7^th and Queen Victoria to name but two.

Our tour visited Glenelg, Adelaide’s seaside resort, a bit like Weston Super Mare but smaller.

We rode the bus an extra bit when we got back so that a group could get on a River Cruise; but the traffic was awful, a Muslim Women’s group were demonstrating carrying black flags, no idea what that was all about.

Adelaide is a ‘planned city’; back in 1839, Colonel Light and his Surveyors laid the ground plans which are the same today, our guide described it as an easy city to live, I can see why, no big jams, parks all round the central city and all the facilities you could ever want. 

We rode the free circle bus and went to Ayers House, one of the explorers who built Australia and had the rock named after him. However the Australian National Trust has no idea how to organise such a treasure, we had missed a tour by a few minutes and the next one was over an hour later; of course we were not allowed to go round on our own. This place is in the Central Square Mile of Adelaide and on most of the major bus routes, very close to a major park, Our National Trust would get over 1,000 visitors a day, the Australians aren’t good at everything, just most.

After our trip to the Barossa Valley we had a few hours to spare and went back to Glenelg with it's direct tram to the city of Adelaide and its neighbour Brighton, both very nice little coastal places with history, and very close to the Airport.

 

 

We found an amazing anomaly in petrol prices, When we first hired a car in Melbourne we paid A$1.38 per litre, A$1.48 in Queensland (apparently there is always a 10 cent rise over the Christmas holiday. In Alice Springs the price was A$1.70, transporting fuel 1,500 km is probably very expensive; but around Adelaide we paid A$1.34 on the freeway, and then A$1.31 in Brighton; 2 miles away towards the airport the price was A$1.50; absolutely amazing.