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Adelaide

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After a brief stop in Melbourne (did the obligatory sight seeing and caught up on some sleep) we had a week in Adelaide with our friends Phil & Jo.

Phil & Jo (and Floyd the friendliest Staff in the world) emigrated to Australia about 2 years ago, and we hadn’t seen them since. We stayed in their lovely house in Port Adelaide, a suburb about 20 mins from the city centre. The house is a typically Aussie single-storey affair, with palm trees in the front garden, big breezy rooms, a large garden with a veggie patch sprouting everything from lettuce to bell peppers (or capsicums they call them out here), and a garage that Phil is converting into a good ol’ British pub!

Adelaide is in the state of South Australia and is situated on a flat plain contained by the sea to the West and the rolling Adelaide hills to the North. If there’s one thing Australia has in abundance it’s space and this is reflected in the layout of Adelaide. There is no imperative need to build upwards so most of the buildings outside of the city proper are wide and flat; the roads that disect the city have up to 3 or 4 lanes each way and even two tram lines in some places; traffic is pretty much unheard of; there is plenty of parkland and even free parking areas dotted around; massive American-style uber-stores line the city’s in-roads, with such delights as a drive in 24-hour off licence (or ‘bottlo’) and an unusual number of Adult ‘emporiums’!

In between supping cocktails in the sunny garden, eating home-cooked food, barbecues, and boozing in the city, we actually managed to pack a lot of other activities in:

We took a tour to the Maclaren Vale, one of the top 5 wine producing areas in the world. A tour guide met us in the city and we headed out towards the valley. As we drove through parched – SA is the driest state in the driest continent of the world – yet still green woodland the guide imparted various facts about Adelaide (it’s the only city in Oz named after a lady, King William IV’s wife, for instance) and the woodland soon gave way to the undulating hills of the Maclaren Vale, contoured with autumnal grape vines, olive trees and rose bushes (apparently rose bushes are used as an early warning system for crop diseases). During the day we went tasting at 6 different wineries, sampled locally grown olives, had a tour of a winery which explained the whole production process, from picking to bottling, and Amy even managed to talk one of the growers into letting her feed his kangaroo (no, that’s not a euphemism!).

On another day we went to Mt. Lofty, the highest peak in the Adelaide hills. The view of the city from the top was breathtaking – the tree-clad hills fell away below us like fields of brocolli towards the vaulted office blocks and stately museums of the city centre, encased, like a green moat, by a thick belt of parkland. The suburbs splayed outwards, defined by their wide boulevards and in the far distance the sea spread across the horizon. Much to Amy’s pleasure, Mt. Lofty is also home to Clelland Wildlife Park, where she got to partake once again in what is becoming her favourite passtime – feeding kangaroos! The kangaroos, some with little joeys peeking out of their pouches, lounged and hopped around along with wallabies, koala bears, emus, bandicoots, Tasmanian devils and possum, all in a perfect hilltop setting where the trees sported a wintry white sheen under their half-peeled bark.

We also went rambling at the nearby Morialti Gorge. Of course, the rain had figured out where we were by now but, unperturbed, we donned our Pak-a-Maks…and got soaked! It was worth it though, we were rewarded by some awesome views of the layered brown and granite sheer sides of the gorge and saw the year’s first spurts of water trickle their way down the thirsty waterfall. We visited an enormous flea-market that was almost the size of Heathrow’s T5 at the port, where for some reason the water was brimming with jellyfish; we perused the stalls of Central Market (the biggest indoor market in the Southern Hemisphere no less!) where you can buy just about every foodstuff known to man; and of course we went to the beach, which was only about 10 minutes from P & J’s house and had sand that was a soft as silk.

On our last night we went to a live Aussie Rules Football match! Unfortunately the team that we were ‘for’, Port Power, got humiliated 32 – 104 by St. Kilda, a Melbourne team. It’s a great game to watch, played by consummate giants with plenty of crunching collisions, sickening tackles and even the odd punch-up! Best of all though, was when ‘the Port’ were going through a particularly bad spell and some of the supporters around us decided to hurl obscenities at the ref/umpire. One called him a ‘flamin’ turkey’, another ‘a bloody great girl’ and a third even likened his IQ to the number on the back of his shirt (1). Frankly we were disgusted – you’d never hear that sort of language at a football match back home. You should have heard us tutting.

As you can see, we had a busy week at P & J’s. It was a respite from travelling – a home from holiday, so nice to have a few home comforts – a nice bed, warm showers, TV, music, home-cooked food – and really good to see P & J. We were sad to leave at the end of the week (we even put our flight back one day.) but we had to fly to Cairns to pick up our Wicked Campervan tomorrow and begin our journey down the East coast.

Bali

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We only had a week in Bali and decided to travel round the Indonesian island so as to see as much of it as possible. The first town we came to was Kuta, a party town-cum-surfer’s paradise, a kind of Benidorm for Australians (but much more attractive!). We stayed in an area of town called Poppy’s Gang, a maze of streets barely the width of a car sandwiched between main strip of cavernous night-clubs and heaving bars, and the beach. The beach, or more specifically the monstrous waves, are the reason for Kuta’s surf-mecca status. They crash, laden with sun-tanned surfers, onto the wide sandy beach which is peppered with a myriad upright surf boards for hire manned by Indonesians with unlikely names such as Ricky, Brad and Antonio; goofy surf bums lounge around, periodically punching the air, whooping and ‘Yeah!’ing at their friend’s surfing prowess. I took an hour’s surf lesson with ‘Eddie’ and actually managed to stand up and surf! We spent three nights in Kuta, taking full advantage of the nightlife, before heading to Ubud.

Ubud must be one of the prettiest towns on the planet, certainly that we’ve come across. There is an unnatural preponderance of wood-carving shops and intricately ornate temples – so much so that people live in and amongst them, park their car or set up shop in them! You can’t go more than five yards without having to step over one of the decorative offerings that the locals make to some god or other – a smouldering joss stick atop a colourful banana-leaf dish of petals and technicolour rice. It feels like every day is a religious festival. As we only had one night in Ubud we wasted no time in renting a scooter so we could explore the surrounding countryside of (more) temples and fluorescent green rice paddy fields.

We visited a monkey sanctuary forest where the little Macaque monkeys were everywhere; thieving, screeching, fighting and fornicating. We also set out to find a scene that we’d only seen on a postcard in Kuta – a winding river with verdant rice paddies carved into its sloping valley sides like giant steppes. Amazingly, through guesswork alone, we found it! We caught a tantalising glimpse of the top of one of the valley slopes on the other side of a large rice plantation so we ditched the bike and set off on foot. After about 15 minutes we came to the crest of a ridge over which we would be able to see the river in all its splendour. We approached with bated breath and camera in hand…but then the dogs attacked. We whimpered, tried to not look scared, and turned back the way we came to find another set of bigger, meaner, slavering dogs in front of us; gnashing and barking. Trapped. Luckily a guy with a machete came and saved us. We scampered back to the bike and made good our escape! The next day we got the bus to Lovina.

Lovina would have been a waste of time if not for the dolphin spotting trip we took. We had to get up at 6am and make our way to the beach where we were picked up by a 4-man catamaran/boat type thing. The sea was as placid as a lake in the violet and orange pre-dawn wisps of light, and it took us no time at all to find the dolphins. Dozens of them were flipping and splashing around about a mile off-shore. Occasionally they would jump clear out of the water, silhoutted against the sun that was beggining to rise from behind mountains shrouded in the morning mist. It was a lovely scene. Most impressive of all was the solitary whale dolphin; much bigger and rougher-skinned than the others, it broke the surface periodically in its rhythmic glide through the mercurial ocean.

Apparently Lovina, which is located on the north coast of the island, never really recovered from the Bali bombings. Touts and hawkers are prevalent throughout Bali, but in Lovina they pester and badger relentlessly with an urgency that borders on desparation. In fact the whole town has an air of desparation about it. The beach is of black sand, which sounds curiously appealing, but in reality looks like the apocalyptic aftermath of a nuclear fall-out! We hired out a scooter on our penultimate day but no sooner had we signed the rental agreement than a sound rippled through the sky – the monsoon had found us! We headed back to Kuta for our final night in Bali, indeed in Asia, before our flight to Australia.

And so ends our little jaunt into South East Asia. It’s been an unforgettable ten weeks, from riding elephants and white-water rafting in the north of Thailand; hurtling along vertiginous mountain roads and drunkenly navigating rapids in Laos; watching the sun rise over the ancient temple of Angkor Wat and discovering our own deserted beach in Cambodia; experiencing the roaring buzz of Ho Chi Minh city and sailing between the prehistoric pillars of Ha Long bay in Vietnam; and learning to surf and encountering dolphins in Indonesia. This part of the world has so much to offer, and there’s so much we didn’t get round to doing but regrettably this part our journey is over. It’s a bittersweet feeling though, because now we make our way to Australia, a whole new continent and a whole new adventure.