Tag Archives: Cityscape

Wandering around Adelaide

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Thursday 29 August 2024 – We’ve been in Adelaide now for two and a half days, having arrived off the Ghan on Tuesday morning. The train was a great experience, on several levels – relief at being able to cope in a small cabin, excellent sights and scenes on our excursions and great food and service from the crew, who all worked really hard to make sure that people enjoyed themselves as much as they could.

So, as we pulled into Adelaide at around midday, we said our farewells to various people that we’d met and talked to on the train, disembarked and linked up with our (very chatty) driver, Alan, as we waited for the suitcases to arrive.  When they did arrive, there was the usual feeding frenzy as people lunged for their bags,

but we got ours quite quickly, and Alan ferried us to our hotel,

where thankfully there was a room ready for us. And I have to say how much I enjoyed having lots of space once more; we had a substantial and very well-organised room on the 18th floor. It even had kettle and milk and so we were able to have a Nice Cup Of Tea as we pondered what to do with ourselves during our time in Adelaide; we actually had nothing formally organised and so had the rest of the day and two more full days at our disposal.

So we went for a lot of walks. Obviously.

Over the last two-and-a-half days, we’ve covered about 30km as we explored the city and the various aspects that interested us. I could bombard you with the photos we’ve taken, but that would make for an exceedingly long post, so I’ll summarise here and point you at albums on Flickr should you wish to see a greater range of photos. Basically, though, we’ve really enjoyed our time here – Adelaide is a lovely city to walk around.

One of the attractive things about it is the old, colonial-style architecture, with elaborate ironwork decorating many buildings. There are also many impressive edifices squeezed (rather like London) between more modern skyscrapers. Here’s a taster.

You can see a whole lot more of the photos in this Flickr Album, which covers the main part of the city.  North Adelaide features a couple of streets with several notable buildings in them, and we made this the special destination of one walk, which yielded several more photos of this traditional architecture.

We came across a lot of murals as we walked around.

More of these can be found here on Flickr.

One particular installation is worth picking out, though, something just behind our hotel.  It looked like just this wall above a mural

but closer examination showed that it had model vehicles of all types stuck to it

in their thousands!

Yet again – Why? Who?? How???

There were lots of other things to be enjoyed as we walked around – the Central Markets, some other street art installations, the interior of the Catholic Cathedral, the Botanic Gardens and more.

The laughing chap above is one of Australia’s greatest comedians, Roy Rene, later known as Mo, some of whose catchphrases entered Australian vernacular: “Don’t come the raw prawn with me” is one of the best known. The Australian entertainment industry’s annual award for excellence in live performance is named the “Mo Award” after him.

The Palm House in the Botanic Garden is a restored Victorian glasshouse imported from Bremen in Germany in 1875; it arrived prefabricated but almost all the glass was smashed in transit and so new glass had to be fitted in situ!

The Queen Victoria waterlily, a native of the Amazon, is the second largest of all waterlilies and has huge leaves – these in the Botanic Garden were easily 1 metre in diameter and it can grow much bigger.

We found some amusing uses of the language.

There’s lots more photos here on Flickr.

We had more amusement looking out for the name of Polites. I first saw this word writ large on the outside of a building near our hotel

and wondered what it meant.  It turns out to be the name of one Constantine Polites, a Greek man who grew up in poverty but worked his way up into being a major property tycoon in the city; every building he bought in the Central Business District (CBD) featured his name. Some still feature it and we had fun looking out for them – Toujours Le Polites!

Near the Botanic Gardens is the Botanic Park, and Jane had read that it might be possible to see flying foxes – fruit bats – there.  So we included this as we walked back from North Adelaide. And, indeed, you can see some fruit bats there.

Lots of them.

No really, lots.

Apparently this colony migrated from Eastern Australia as its food source dried up there and found its way into Botanic Park. There are between 20 and 40,000 of them to be seen! We spent a good few minutes watching them as they flew about

and I took some video of them as they squabbled among themselves about the best place to hang about.

The last thing we did was to catch the Adelaide tram down to the seaside suburb of Glenelg. (We nearly didn’t catch the tram because at the first stop we awaited one I’d failed to notice that there was no weekday service.) It was mentioned as being worth a visit, and so we walked around it, obviously; but we were out of season, and so it wasn’t really at its best. It has a smart town hall

but the beach is a bit weedy by the jetty (well, we think it’s seagrass, actually, which is a good thing if somewhat fragrant)

and is still a work in progress elsewhere.

It’s very clearly a seaside-y sort of place

which seems to be waiting for the season to get under way.  There are some cute touches

some posher bits, such as the Marina Pier,

and, clearly, a heavy investment in Norfolk Island Pine trees,

but it was pretty quiet. I can imagine it’s more lively once spring moves towards summer.

So that is Adelaide in a nutshell. We’ve really enjoyed walking around and taking it in, and it’s been really nice to be able to decompress in comfort after the cultural and touristic overload of the Kimberley and the Ghan.

Tomorrow we’re back on the Relentless Tourism Treadmill as we head to Kangaroo Island, and I’ll try to keep these pages updated as we dive back into the maelstrom of our great Australian Adventure.

 

 

Off the ship and into Darwin

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Thursday 22 August – Yesterday was a day spent at sea making the transit from the Kimberley to Darwin. The day was therefore spent mainly doing end-of-cruise admin – repacking the suitcases, paying the bills, that kind of thing.  There was one important event to attend, though. Although we’d avoided most of the “social” activities on board the ship, the guides had organised a photo competition, which, of course, is catnip to me. There were four categories in which to submit entries – Landscape, Wildlife, Social and “Wild card” (i.e. anything at al). Unsurprisingly, I had no candidates for the social category, but  I did submit entries for the other three. And, ahem…

(and another photo was a runner up, too, in the wild card category). One lady won two of the categories with a couple of cracking photos, but sadly couldn’t be there to celebrate her success, as she had Covid and was confined to her cabin.

By about 6pm we could see Darwin in the distance, albeit not very clearly. The lack of clarity in the view was almost certainly down to what we think must be a bush fire somewhere in the area.

The smoke gave some nice atmosphere to photos as we approached,

and then we had arrived.

It would have been possible to leave the ship for a wander around, but we expected to do that after we finally disembarked, so we concentrated on having a few final free cocktails….

As is normal with these things, next morning we were flung off the ship in very short order; out of our cabins by 8am and off the boat by 9.

We were staying in the Vibe Waterfront hotel, as were several other passengers, so APT had laid on a coach to take us there from the port – a lengthy drive covering a total distance of about 500m. On the way, though, the driver gave us a couple of useful tips about places to visit and to eat.

It being not long after 9am at this point, our hotel room wasn’t ready for us, of course. So we went for a walk. Obviously.

Darwin’s not a big place, but it has some interesting things to see, which Jane, in her usual organised fashion, had scoped out for us. The hotel itself is in the Waterfront area, a redevelopment, i.e. gentrification. It has its own small but perfectly-formed beach,

which fronts a water park

in an area which seems pretty nice for a leisurely swim., protected from those nasty ocean waves

(though we discovered later that they can turn them on for you if you want).

At the end of the wharf which protects the waterfront area is a uniquely Australian exhibition.

which, although it doesn’t say it on the door, is also dedicated to something that unsurprisingly figures high in the local consciousness:

the wartime bombing of Darwin (February 1942).

We went in to take a general wander round and were immediately bossed about in a very organised way by a lady who was clearly part of The Management; she told us about a simulation of the attack which happened every 20 minutes, as air raid sirens went off, and an immersive screen showed a visualisation of what it might have looked like.

We were then ushered into a small film theatre for two “holograms”: one told the story of the genesis of the Flying Doctor Service, including how it became Royal; the other was the story of an American general on the scene of the bombing – both done really quite well, and very interesting.

The bombing of Darwin on 19 February 1942 was the largest single attack ever mounted by a foreign power on Australia. On that day, 242 Japanese aircraft, in two separate raids, attacked the town, ships in Darwin Harbour, and the town’s two airfields in an attempt to prevent the Allies from using them as bases to contest the invasion of Timor and Java during World War II. Darwin was lightly defended relative to the size of the attack, and the Japanese inflicted heavy losses upon Allied forces at little cost to themselves. No wonder it’s something that still looms large in the folk memory here – although relations with Japan nowadays are cordial.

The centre also has a real Flying Doctor aeroplane there.

There was a VR setup which gave one the chance to see the Flying Doctor service from the point of view of both patient and pilot.

The hologram film gave an excellent overview of the development of the RFDS, starting from its inspiration: the case of someone who had to travel hundreds of kilometres and wait six days for treatment after a major farming accident. This inspired the Reverend John Flynn to look for ways to solve the problem of communicating and delivering medical care across the remoteness of the Australian interior.  The combination of nascent aviation capabilities and a pedal-driven radio proved to be a successful one, allowing the service in time to grow to its current roles: nationwide, the service has over 80 aircraft and includes flying dentistry and flying mental health services alongside emergency and primary medical care.

The Flying Doctor Service was allowed to add “Royal” to its name after HM Elizabeth II visited in 1954; she talked to people over the pedal-driven radio, though I bet someone else did the pedalling.

All in all, it was a very worthwhile and interesting hour spent at the centre.

We went back to the hotel, but our room still wasn’t ready. So, after a coffee, we went for another walk. Obviously.

Downtown Darwin is on a plateau somewhat higher than the Waterfront, and is reached via a lift (well, you can use the steps if you want, but the temperature was around 30°C, so sod that for a game of soldiers).  We passed some handsome buildings, such as Government House,

the oldest colonial building in Darwin,  and the Northern Territory Library, which is a very imposing building.

Outside the library, a group of Masked Lapwings were having a barney

and we saw an Orange-Footed Scrubfowl, scrubbing about very orange-footedly.

We then headed for Austin Street, which is noted for its street art. It is indeed very varied and colourful.

By this stage, the temperature was well into the 30s, and so we headed back towards the hotel. We passed the site of the Darwin Festival, an 18-day event which is due to continue until 25 August,

and the Anglican Cathedral, which is definitely an Interesting Church

albeit a closed one; it was possible to see inside through the front door, though.

Some White Ibis (“Bin Chickens”) were squabbling outside.

Our route back to the hotel also took us near another Darwin unique, the WWII Oil Tunnels. These were tunnels built as underground oil storage tanks, in the aftermath of 1942 Japanese bombing of the above-ground ones that were already there.  The enterprise was a massive engineering undertaking, with many problems and false steps along the way; and it wasn’t a massive success.  11 tunnels were envisaged, and six were completed by the end of the war, and so weren’t needed by that stage, although tunnels 5 & 6 were used for storage of aviation fuel during a confrontation with Indonesia in the 1950s.

Tunnels 5 and 6 are now open to the public. For a fee, of course.

It looks like a tunnel, but actually this is the interior of one of the tanks

This engaging sculpture can be seen at the junction of a couple of the tunnels.

Even after all this peregrination, our hotel room was still not ready, but we sat in the blessed cool of reception for a few minutes and then were at last admitted. Actually, the room is pretty good – plenty of USB charging points, plus a kettle, Earl Grey and milk in the fridge. And face flannels in the bathroom, something that seems to be standard over here, whereas it’s disappointingly lacking in most other countries we’ve visited. Including the UK, I might add.

We had a really very good late lunch/early dinner at a bus-driver-recommended restaurant, Snapper Rocks, just along the way from the hotel and retired to our room to rest and prepare ourselves for the morrow. We are due on an all-day outing to visit Litchfield National Park, which on the face of it offers many diversions, termite mounds, waterfalls and crocodiles among them, so it would seem an interesting day awaits. Let’s see how it turns out.

 

 

 

 

Getting there – and getting essential supplies

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Saturday 3 August 2024 – The agency, Audley, which is managing our itinerary (under the beady eye of the household travel co-ordinator, i.e. Jane) has done a distinctly average job of creating, and, critically, presenting us with, our schedule. Quite early on in the planning process we were given a very good general idea of where we would be and when, and what we would be doing when we got there; but important details (timings, meeting arrangements, etc) were missing, in many cases until a couple of days before our departure, and a few things had to be corrected after regression errors crept in as we moved from version to version of our schedule.  However, it looks like the whole – and very substantial – itinerary has come together nicely. As well as to Jane, thanks are due in no small part to Judy at Spear Travels, who cracked the whip very effectively for us.

STOP PRESS: Two days into our vacation, our trip is at last visible to us on the (admittedly cool-looking) Audley Travel Companion app, which will be a convenient way of accessing our itinerary details, which would otherwise be a bit of an encumbrance to  carry round with us everywhere.

The longest of journeys starts, as the saying doesn’t quite go, with a single taxi ride. Our taxi turned up early and got us very comfortably to the airport, whence everything moved very swiftly and unproblematically through the journey to Perth, our arrival point in Australia, reached via Singapore.

I say unproblematical; actually our departure from London was delayed, but only around 30 minutes. Any more than that and our transit through Singapore might have been rather inelegantly brisk, but the timings worked out fine.  We spent a long time on the various taxiways between terminal and takeoff, and I got an opportunity to capture a timelapse of the rather elegant ballet that goes on when there are several aeroplanes converging on the relevant runway.

I was interested to see a Concorde parked on the outfield; I didn’t realise that there were any left in the wild.

The arrival process of getting through customs and immigration and picking up our bags at Perth was impressively smooth and swift. We had to fill out an arrival card on the flight from Singapore, in which we promised that we weren’t convicts (no longer, it seems, an entry requirement to the country), didn’t have tuberculosis and weren’t bringing with us anything untoward, meaning, basically, foodstuffs. Because I knew that the Powers That Be in Australia are quite pernickety about such things, I had decided that we shouldn’t bring any home comforts that might cause a ruckus at the border; so we actually arrived in The Foreign without any of Twinings Finest Earl Grey just in case. Or, more accurately, not in either of our cases.

We were greeted at Perth’s airport by a very cheery chap called Stephen, who whisked us swiftly to our hotel, the QT, whilst simultaneously giving us a useful commentary about Western Australia and Perth, and making a useful recommendation of an outing we should undertake (Fremantle) and when (Sunday, i.e. tomorrow) because The Market Will Be On, and that’s a Good Thing.

The hotel is quite posh and is extremely conveniently located in downtown Perth,

but is architecturally unremarkable beyond being 18 stories tall with a Sky Terrace at the top (the highest bar in Perth, we understand), which sounds like something we should definitely acquaint ourselves with before we move on.

Another key datum that Stephen vouchsafed was that the shops were only open until 5pm, and, it being by this stage about 4.30pm, as you can understand we had an important shopping mission to undertake, which was to find a supermarket, and fast. Google Maps promised that there was a Woolworth’s (no relation, for those of a certain age) a couple of minutes away, and so off we scurried – not in quite the right direction, as it happens.  The Woollies was in a mall, and our efforts to find the entrance led us down a rather disreputable-seeming alleyway, which was, however, decorated rather beautifully.

Suffice it to say, we eventually found the shop and returned to the hotel bearing our spoils, whereupon we discovered something that raised the hotel in my estimation. They provided a kettle in the room. And largish cups for the tea. And milk in the minibar fridge.

Having used the shopping expedition to help us orient ourselves, and still being fairly full of Singapore Airlines (really rather nice) food, we needed to spend a few minutes before finding further sustenance. So we went for a walk. Obviously.

We didn’t cover much ground because it was heading towards sunset and, being winter, it was likely to get a bit chilly after the sun had disappeared.  But we were able to get a sample of the colonial buildings one can still find in Perth, squeezed in between all the modern high rise stuff.

Perth Town Hall (you can just see the side of our hotel on the left)

The old Treasury building

The Old Courthouse

We headed down to the water – the Swan River – also passing more modern buildings such as the Bell Tower

which has definite shades of Sydney Opera House in its side view.

Nearby is Elizabeth Quay

which has a very distinctive footbridge giving access from the west.

As you can see, the sun was going down by this stage, and it was indeed getting a bit chilly, so we headed back to the hotel, past another part of Perth’s architectural vernacular,

modern buildings in a faux-old style.  I think a lot of the colonial-era buildings have been demolished over the years, and in many cases replaced by steel-and-glass constructions; but there was more than a sprinkling of this more welcome style as well.

The QT Hotel offers an Italian restaurant called Santini, and we repaired there for an early evening bite to eat.  It was Saturday night and there was a wedding going on, so it was a tad on the raucous side, but provided a decent enough meal, after which we retired to our room to try to stay awake for a while to try to stave off the worst of the jet lag.  Crossing time zones can be unsettling enough, and crossing them from west to east is the more challenging direction, and we wanted to try to avoid the usual wide-awake-at-4am consequence of losing seven hours of the day.

I have to report that we failed, although not spectacularly.  It was around 8.30 at night when we both decided that we were losing the struggle to stay awake, and so we turned in. We had no formal schedule to have to work to, just an inchoate plan to get to Fremantle somehow. Stay tuned to see how that all worked out, eh?