Adelaide

Well, what an adventure. Have just returned from Kangaroo Island, off the south coast of Southern Australia, our second state.
After the apparent emptiness and heat of Perth, the emptiness and endlessness of heat, red road and flies on the Nullabor, we settled on the foreshore of Ceduna, a little town on the coast, and met our first Aboriginal people. Unfortunately they were drunk and constantly being moved on from place to place. They sat on the foreshore, under the trees, not far from the bottle shop, and staggered between the pier and the trees. They are an unknown entity to me as I have only seen three small groups, in towns, following this pattern. Since this we have picked up some information from local people and been to the Adelaide Museum, where there was quite an informative display about various aspects of Aboriginal life.
We were quite impressed with the city of Adelaide itself. It is clean and spread out. We popped in and out on the local buses for a $7 ticket, exploring the various features. There are
four main variations: the hills, the wine regions, the city and the coast, a wonderful variety of options, and so easy to get to.
The second that we visited, after the city itself, were the Adelaide Hills, where we visited the vantage point of Mount Lofty, viewing the whole of Adelaide out to the seashore, wonderful. Next to this we wandered around the Cleland Wildlife Park. Here, the local flora and fauna was available for our inspection. We saw snoozing wombats in their dens with glass sides. I was really surprised at how big and solid they were, like bulldogs. The only animals enclosed were the ones that sometimes bite! Although thesae looked cuddly they were not!
The wallabies and kangaroos just lounged around in the woodlands that we walked through. One large, very white kangaroo was lying on his back with his paws in the air. All the others lay like dogs, on their sides. I was convinced that he had died until a rather lazy paw came up a few minutes later, to scratch an ear in an abstracted way! The koalas were sleepy and folded up so tightly it was hard to see their faces. They lodge their pudgy little bodies in a fork of a tree and snooze for 18 out of 24 hours, partly because they are mildly intoxicated and partly because the eucalyptus gives poor nutrients so they do not have much energy, poor old souls. They do look a bit out of it!!!! My next favourite were the birds of the forest, the elusive but noisy Kookaburra, the Splendid wren, a tiny bird with the most amazing bright blue plummage, the multi-coloured, vociferous parrots and lorikeets and the huge black and white Pelicans that lift on the wind as light as a feather, magnificent. I have akready seen the largest bird of prey, the Wedge-tailed Eagle, eating road-kill on the Nullabor! We saw dingos and lizards too.
Our next foray was to the beach of Glenelg, where the world volleyball championships were about to take place. This was a bustling little town, packed with a variety of eating places and bars. We liked the bustling atmosphere. On Easter Sunday we drove up into the Barrossa wine region. The scenery was so different and very beautiful. We saw where Hardy's and Jacob's Creek wineries were situated but had a tasting and cheese plate at the Trevor Jones winery before returning to the camp-site on the Torrens river, only 4kms from town. We had been to West Beach and stayed at Adelaide Shores but had to move over the Easter weekend.
All in all, I feel that we saw a fair amount of the region and found it very much to our liking.