Travel Stories - Australia

It is already evening when we arrive in Adelaide with our tour bus. This stops near the bus station and I check with a English guy with whom I have been in the bus for 3 days in a hostel there. The next day we walk through the city that is rather new (it seems to have been founded in 1836) and is named after Adelheid van Saksen-Meiningen, the wife of the then reigning English king William IV. As in the US, the streets are laid out in a grid, and it is fairly green with lots of trees and parks. Everywhere you see art galleries and lots of museums. It is bigger than you think and it later turns out to be the fifth largest city in Australia with more than 1 million people. Adelaide is known as the 'City of Churches' because of the many churches that the city counts and that is good to see when you start to pay attention to it. Another common name is "the 20 minute city", because of the good accessibility of almost all places in and even outside the city.

We decided to visit the old city prison which is now a museum and it seems it’s still quite a walk from our hostel. Once there we get an old tape recorder as a guideness which is actually half the fun of our visit. The prison seems to have ended in 1988 and we look at what old cells and attributes which were made and abandoned by former prisoners. On the watchtower our cassette deck stops and we have actually seen enough and go back to our hostel to freshen up for the evening.  

In the evening we join up with the women's group of the bus tour yesterday and we walk to the Botanical Gardens on the edge of the center. The temperature is fantastic and the ladies bought a picnic basket full of drinks and food with them so that we don’t have to do any more shopping. We share the costs and lay down some rugs on one of the grass in the park. When it gets dark, a movie is played outside and it turns out to be the old classic "Grease". It feels like I am in an old American movie and with this film this feeling is only reinforced. It is a wonderful evening and when the film is over and everyone goes home we decide to have a nightcap in the bar of the hostel. Unfortunately we have to break up because I will be picked up very early tomorrow for another tour to the “Outback”. My roommate booked a wine tour for the next day to the surrounding areas around Adelaide and we say goodbye and with each other a great trip.