Adelaide Adventures!

Adelaide Adventures
Yeah, I had my own room again, loved it and had a good night’s sleep! I didn’t do very much on Wednesday. Emma and I just walked around the city, had breakfast somewhere, then bought a smoothie and finished that in a park. I had found a flyer for the cinema and there were some interesting movies playing that day. So we set out to find the cinema, which wasn’t exactly where we thought it would be, but we found it. There were two movies we were interested in, Joy and Youth with Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel. Since they are both good actors, we decided to go for that one. We bought our tickets right then, so we wouldn’t have to bother with that later today. The price was staggering though, $19,50 for a ticket!!! O well…
Then we walked around the Botanical Gardens and around 3pm I started to feel a bit hungry again. In Rundle street we found a schnitzel restaurant, very good! While working on the ship I had met Rose, who lives in Adelaide and works at the Adelaide Zoo, who has two giant panda’s, which she is absolutely crazy about! I had already kept her posted as to when I was coming to Adelaide and that morning I called her to set up a time to meet. She had to work at the Zoo until 5pm, so I said I would be there around 4pm. So after our late lunch, Emma went back to the hostel and I went to the Zoo to meet up with Rose.
Once there she immediately took me to see the panda’s, where I stayed until she was done with work. Around 5pm we went to a café on Rundle street for coffee and to talk about what we were going to do. She had Thursday off and was willing to drive out somewhere. We decided to go to Victor Harbour, which is about an hour’s drive south. Then she dropped me off at the YHA, where I dropped my bag in my room, got my jacket and went out with Emma to the cinema. We got something to drink and snacks at the supermarket before we went in. Our seats were in the back, which was very nice. Not that it was a very big theater and it wasn’t all that busy, but it is nice to have seats in the back.
So, this is a movie about old guys getting older really and half way through the movie I wished we had bought tickets for the other movie!!! God it was really, really bad!!!! I couldn’t get over it!! Here we have two great actors and they’re acting in such a stupid, non-sensable movie!!!!!! All the way back to the hostel Emma and I were talking about it, just couldn’t decide wether or not we even liked the movie!! But basically I’ll warn all of you not to go there and spend money on a ticket!! If you really want to see it, try to get it on Netflix or something like that!!!
Anyway, Emma and I said our goodbyes when we got back, I gave her my card, hope to keep in touch with her. We had a good time! She was going back to Sydney on Thursday and I was going to spend the day with Rose.
So Thursday morning I left the hostel around 8:30am to get to the Zoo at around 9:30am, which is opening time. I took another route to get there, but halfway through I thought it was getting me away from the Zoo, so I ended up taking the road I walked on the day before. But I got there in time, so it was all good!
Rose had arranged two animal encounters for me, one with Squirrel Monkeys and one with Coati’s. The first encounter was at 11am, so we still had some time, which we spend a the pandas of course! It is soo funny to see them eat and then turn their backs to you as if to say they’ve had enough of you!! They’ve got a male WangWang and a female Funi, which they think might be pregnant. But they can’t do an ultrasound yet, as there will be nothing to see yet. They won’t be able to do that until a week or so before it is born. A newborn baby panda is as big as a peanut. So around the end of February, beginning of March they’ll know for sure.
Rose also took me to see Quokka’s, there was Kinta, who let me pet her, that was really sweet! Then at 5 minutes to 11am, we were at the Squirrel Monkey cage. I took off my bracelets, because they tend to be little thieves! There were 4 of us, we could leave our bags in a little cage before we stepped into the big cage. We were told to keep our arms to our sides, palms open and to avoid eye contact with them, because they would see that as a threat.
There was a branch with for coconut halves on them, which the keeper filled with food for them. We were to stand in front of that branch, with our backs to them, so the monkeys would come up behind us. Now I’m not a very big fan of monkeys running around, we have a monkey zoo at home, where you can walk around among the monkeys and I’m definitely not a fan of that. But this was actually a lot of fun!! They really liked hair, there was a women with blue/purple hair and they really liked that! One of the monkeys got to steal the elastic right out of her hair!
Then one of them also liked my necklace and he wanted to carry it off with him, but I was still attached to it, so he didn’t get very far!!! And they like looking down your shirt to make sure there’s nothing to eat in there. It was a lot of fun!
Then we went for some coffee and tea, to wait for the next encounter which was at noon. I went out to the Coati’s, when Rose went out to put some more money in the meter for the car! She couldn’t go into the cage with me, because there was only space for three people and two spaces were already booked when she put my name down. Coati’s look like raccoons with little pigs noses, they’re really cute! We got half of a coconut on a stick filled with egg and some veggies and we could go in and walk over to a branch, where they knew they would get their food.
There were 3 girls, sisters and they were sooo cute!! Here we didn’t have to be worried about things being taken or your hair being attacked, they just liked the fact that we were there with their food! One of them kept coming back to make sure the coconut was really empty!!! With both encounters there was a photographer with us and Rose took some pictures of me from the other side of the fence. At the end of this encounter we went up to the shop, where I could look at the pictures. Per encounter I got a free picture and every other picture I wanted was $10,-. I got two pictures each, but Rose was going to copy some more for me later!!!
Around 12:30pm we stepped into the car and drove south to Victor Harbour. It took us about an hour through the Adelaide Hills, we passed the town where Rose was born, Willunga, which means place of many trees and there were indeed many of them! One of her sisters still lives there.
Around 1:30pm we were having our fish and chips at a place in Victor Harbour, it took a while to find a parking spot. Once we got out of the car, it took us a while to decide wether or not we would need jackets too. It was really windy down here and it was cold, but when we were standing by the car we didn’t really notice it. Once in town we had to walk in the sun to feel the warmth just a little. There’s a horse drawn tram that takes people out to Granite Island, we wanted to go, but the tram was full, so we had to wait half an hour for the other one to come back. So we got on board around 3:30pm and of course we got seats inside the tram, not on top of the tram!! There was only one horse pulling the tram, he did a pretty good job!
Rose told me that the island used to have a penguin colony, until dogs and cats decimated them and now there’s no penguins at all. The rocks are granite, the kind you find in kitchen counter tops. I was surprised the granite was still there, I thought someone would have taken everything off of the island by now to sell it!
We did get off of the tram for a while, but we got on again as soon as it was about to go back to Victor Harbour. It was just too cold to do anything when you were only wearing a t- shirt and shorts! Once we were back on the main land, we had some coffee with a little of something sweet in a café/ second hand store. It was really nice. Then we got back into the car to go and see Rose’s sister and her husband. They were also on the ship when Rose gave me her card and when Rose told them that I was coming, they wanted her to bring me over for a bbq at their house!
So we took some back roads down there and tried to find koala’s up in the trees, but we didn’t see any. Rose’s sister has 2 daughters and the oldest one is living with them, she has a 2 year old son, who is a very busy, demanding little guy!! Good lord, he wanted us to follow him around everywhere!! Rose went outside to go for a walk with him and when she came back she told me she had spotted a koala in a tree right outside her sister’s house!!! That was soo cute!!! He/she had a little white butt and there was a small branch stuck in his buttcrack, didn’t look very comfortable from where I was standing! Haha
The bbq was great and we were all talking about things we have done and seen and of course about the cruise they had done where we met. I had a great time, it was good to see them again! We left around 9pm, Rose took me back to the hostel, before she went back to her house.
Friday morning I had to get up early, because I had booked an excursion on the Murray River. I had to get on a bus at the busstation, which is right behind the hostel, so that wasn’t all too bad. I had bought some tea, but I wasn’t allowed to take that on the bus with me, so I had to finish it outside. By the time I got on the bus I had to sit all the way in the back, because all of the seats were already taken. The driver told us about the towns we passed along the way, but sitting in the back with all the noise from the engine made it hard to understand everything he said.
We got off of the bus at Murray Bridge, where we got onto a boat called the Proud Mary. Which unfortunately wasn’t a paddle steamer. That one only goes out for 3 or 7 day trips up and down the Murray River. Around 11am we set off for a cruise on the river, we all went inside to get some coffee or tea and that is where I met Tanya. She worked for the company that had several companies under their wing, who sold these excursions and she was here to see how it worked out. Also at the table was a lady from New Zealand, when I told them I was from the Netherlands, she wanted to know from which city. So when I told her that I lived in Arnhem, she was really surprised, because it turned out that her father was born in Arnhem!!! Later the family moved to Groningen and when he was about 20 years old he immigrated to New Zealand, he had married a local girl and hadn’t gone back to the Netherlands since. But she told me that now that he got older, he sometimes talked to them in Dutch!! Her name was Wanda, which is almost a similarity and she told me she had a lot of Dutch trades in her, bikes and trying to get things cheaper or for free!!! She asked me to write down my address, so she could show it to her father and see if he still remembered some of it.
After tea we went up on the deck to watch the world go by. The scenery was really nice, green trees, black cattle, red earth…muddy water!! Around 11:45am lunch was ready for us, so we went back into the restaurant. It was a buffet lunch, with ham, chicken, prawns, bread, salads and fruit. It was all very good. While we were having lunch, the boat had turned around to get us back to the bus. I had mentioned to Tanya that I wondered why the boat didn’t go all the way to Mannum, since that was where we were going with the bus later anyway. It would save us time, plus now we would just see the same things again. And I also asked her why the different companies offered the same trip for such different prices! I had seen 2 brochures of 2 different companies and the difference in price was $13,-. Later on the bus I saw another brochure and this price was another $4,- more then what I had ended up paying. She said she didn’t know, because she had only just started working there, but she wanted to find out.
Around 1pm we got on the bus to drive to the Mannum Lookout, where we had a view of the Murray River and Mannum city. Then we drove into Mannum, where we had about an hour to wander around. It wasn’t all that big really, they had a couple of bric a brac shops, one of them really filled to the gills with all kinds of stuff!!! We also found the paddle steamer and took pictures.
Then around 3pm we got back on the bus to go to the Melba chocolate factory. While we were driving we got to see a dvd about the worst flood they had in that area since forever, it was in 1956, 3 years after the big flood my country had in the province of Zeeland. It was hard to imagine how bad it was, but the water rose really high and it took a while to go away too.
The chocolate factory was next to a cheese factory where you could sample some cheese and chocolate…but really it was just a major tourist trap!! Especially the chocolate factory, we didn’t get to see a demonstration, but they had everything related or covered in chocolate you can think of for sale! I bought some chocolate covered cashew nuts, which were soft where I expected a crunch.
On our way back to Adelaide we drove through Eagle Hill, a road that is not really used anymore, because of the new highway they had built. But now it was perfect for spotting koala’s and we saw 2 of them!!! Around 6pm we were back at the busstation, where I exchanged email addresses with Wanda, in case her dad had more questions and you never know what that might be good for!!!
I went out to get something to eat and stopped at Nando’s, a restaurant that has a lot of chicken on the menu. I got the chicken tenders and was surprised to get 4 tiny strips of chicken for what I had paid…I didn’t finish the chips, because they were way too salty!
Saturday morning I tried to sleep in a little, I had been busy for a while now and I was really tired. But as soon as I started thinking about the things I had to do, I couldn’t sleep anymore so I got up anway. I checked to see what I was going to do in Darwin and after Darwin and I booked a hotel for a couple of days in Darwin. I had thought about going to Uluru, but the flights were irregular and pretty expensive and so was the accommodation, even the YHA hostels that were there. So after a while I was fed up with it and I left it to decide about what to do when I got there!
It was noon by the time I left the hostel and it was really hot!!!! I didn’t really do very much, had lunch somewhere and I sat in the Botanical Gardens to type a story for a while. Me and Rose had arranged to meet around 6:30pm so we could have dinner together. We ended up eating Greek food, lamb and meatballs, which was really good!!! She had taken some pictures of me during my encounter with the coati’s and we copied those pictures onto my tablet. She had bought me a mug with WangWang on it and a small porcelain wreath Christmas hanger with kangaroos and koala’s on it, really cute! Around 8pm I was back at the hostel already, we both had an early start the next day.
But that’s all for another story!

Love
Linda