Heading downtown to the South Australian Museum ... by tram! Part One

The South Australian Museum ... great place to be on a hot day!

Ten thousand fascinating things ... plus fantastic air conditioning!

The T-Rex gatekeeper: welcome to the museum! But first ... gotta get there. So --

Catch the tram from Glenelg, over on the coast. You don't want to drive downtown!

Watch out for the tram. They come along every 10 minutes, but when you're waiting it seems sooo long.

Aha, here comes a tram! Too bad it's on the wrong track. It'll go down to the Bay -- the seashore -- and return...

...there it goes, heading down Jetty Road to Moseley Square, near the sea -- about a kilometer away. Patience!

A half hour later, here we are getting off the tram, on Adelaide's North Terrace --

Get ready for traffic! This is why you don't want to be driving downtown --

-- though, the buses are colorful. That's the Tour Downunder advertisement. And see where this bus is going?!

North Terrace is a visual feast of classical architecture --

-- as you walk down to the museum and art gallery, remember to look up.

There's also a wealth of statuary. This cavalry memorial is photogenic from any angle. 

The statue of Aphrodite was the first piece of public art
ever presented to the City of Adelaide ... considered scandalous in its day!

Matthew Flinders, RN. From 1801 to 1803 he commanded the first ship to
circumnavigate Australia.

Victorian era bronze statuary ... wish I'd taken notes!

Advance Australia ... just so you know where you are, right?

The National War Memorial ... the image hardly does it justice.

At last, the museum! And after that hike, the first priority is lunch...

The Baleen Cafe is right there in the museum frontage ...

Nice menu, good prices, and great a/c ... the Baleen Cafe at the museum.

Ooooh, smell that coffee! But we didn't come here just for lunch -- we wanted to see stuff, like...

Dinosaur skeletons: cryolophosaurus, an Antarctic dinosaur... 

...the largest ammonite ever discovered...

...amazing geology from all over the state and country...

...and the wonderful, exotic South Pacific collection. 

There's no better way to escape the heat than to spend a day at the museum ... the only challenge being, you have to get there first. There's a good bus service, but the tram is actually better, and "different." Adelaide has one of the last tram services left in the world. It's a pity they're disappearing, because they're a marvelous cross between bus and train.

The images in this post (and Part Two, tomorrow) are actually from several trips and visits to the museum. Some of the exhibits might have changed, but much doesn't -- can't -- change; and certainly the tram ride is pretty much the same no matter when you do it.

The new trams are very quiet. One has memories of "the old rattlers" which we rode for -- how many decades? Some of those trams were running for most of a century. They probably needed retiring, but they'll be missed. Here was the original, now antique tram --

--and not for nothing were they known as "rattlers!" The new trams are smooth, silent, and actually a pleasure to ride in, but they haven't the character of the old ones. Give 'em fifty years!

You can catch the tram from any part of the route from Glenelg onward. We usually find parking in Glenelg and watch for the next one at the tram stop at the top end of Jetty Road, Glenelg. From there, it must be something like twenty minutes to downtown, and then a hike down North Terrace. The State Library, museum, art gallery, University of Adelaide, Royal, Adelaide Hospital and the botanic gardens are all laid out in a neat row on the north side of the Terrace ... you can't get lost.

First: lunch at the Baleen Cafe: coffee, soup of the day or fish'n'chips, or a Greek salad perhaps, and cool off before heading onward and inward.

In tomorrow's post we'll go inside the museum: dinosaurs, geology, and coolness, while outside it's sizzling...

Shades of Green: Mount Lofty Botanic Gardens in early summer

Mount Lofty Botanic Garden in early December ... how green it is! 2013 was an anomalous year, so cool and wet.

Starting the easy hike clockwise: the view out over the water catchment dam...

...and to give you a sense of where you are ... the map! Notice the big red "You Are Here" icon.

Halfway along the catchment lake. Look at those water levels, in December!

This was just about the first really warm/hot day of the season...

...step into the shade, and the temperature instantly  fell ten degrees C. Nice!

Down by the "duck pond," with its lily pads and ferns and iris.

Not to mention the alien vegetation that has snuck in here!

Moorhens ... they call this the "duck pond" for a good reason. 

The walk takes you right around the pond, up by the rhododendron gully --

...shady here, cooler, with Seriously Odd Trees. Anyone know what they are??

And though it was hot, a glance at the sky shows that the weather's about to change.

Beyond the pond, at the lowest point in the park is the Bog Garden.

If the rest of the gardens were lush, you know how the Bog Garden was!

Tiny lizards -- baby blue tongues -- were scampering around the rocks -- too fast to photograph!

From the bog garden you climb up steeply, and suddenly you're looking down on the pond.
Catch your breath here before pressing on...

The flowering trees are so beautiful. Ker-choo!

Did we say, shades of green? Don't think we're ever seen Mount Lofty Gardens this green!

Everything was in bloom, in fact, except for --

The roses. Alas, these were almost the only roses blooming. We arrived
about a week after every bush had been hard-pruned. Darn.

Heading back down toward the parking lot ... Dave's sharp eyes spotted this guy:
a wild kangaroo taking a nap in the early afternoon shade.

The hike back takes you to the other side of the catchment dam, and across it...

One black swan seems to live on the dam. This is so odd, because swans always come in pairs ...
they also mate for life. We've seen this swan alone here since 2006. Did he lose his mate? It's a little sad.

Back on the low side of the lake: hang a left for the parking lot --

Hey, the Millennium Possum waited for us! (Either that, or it made it back in the nick of time...)
And we'd worked up an appetite by now. Anyone for lunch?!

Mount Lofty Botanic Gardens is one of those little patches of paradise. It's been open to the public for about 35 years -- something like 250 acres of trees and shrubs from around the world, from the magnolias that bloom in August to the rhododendrons that run amok in October, to the deciduous trees that change color on the Australian fall, say April and May -- and we'll revisit the park soon to share those images.

This trip was one of those "Where haven't we been in eons?" outings ... and in fact, we hadn't been to this particular park in three or four years. Other parks, gardens, national parks -- sure; but this botanic garden is perched almost right at the highest point of the Mount Lofty Ranges.

We were lucky with the weather: it changing that very afternoon, heading back into showers and gray skies, but it held together ... hot, bright, dry ... while we did the whole "easy" hike, clockwise around the park. There's a lot more to the  Mount Lofty Botanic Gardens than what you see here, but unless you're a mountain goat, you might think twice about it!

So, here you have December 11, 2013 ... and for contrast we just have to give you a link. One of the most beautiful travel/photo/adventure blogs on the web is "Jill Outside," which used to be called "Arctic Glass" when Jill Homer lived and worked in Juneau, Alaska. She's not in AK any longer, but all the Alaskan posts are still there in the early part of the blog ... and on December 11, 2009, she posted "There's no way to write it down," a picture essay depicting the Blackberry Ridge area. Contrast? Same day, albeit in different years.

From other years, we have the images of the magnolias (August -- winter), the rhododendrons (October -- spring), and the fall colors (April or May -- autumn), and we'll come back to  Mount Lofty Botanic Gardens in future posts and share them.

Food Fight at Christies Beach!

The Beachside Food & Wine Festival at Christies Beach draws crowds. Big ones...

This was a few days earlier ... not so crowded...

The weather was getting steadily hotter all that week.
Christies Beach looks like the perfect vacation spot.

A long-shot ... this guy was way out on the horizon, and headed out, not in.

The beach was the place to be: camel and pony rides! Dave had wanted to do this, but it was HOT
and the lines were long. So ... another time. 

Camels, green sea and sailing ships. Perhaps only in South Australia!

The One and All is a training ship, built up at North Haven, at Port Adelaide.

The sand sculptures were all finished by now, and on display...

Dave, and the Octopus Garden -- a few days before. Thank heavens we got all our arty pictures before
the food festival: on the day, the thing you saw most of was the back of the guy in front of you!

Sunday was HOT for the food festival itself, and one One and All was just one of many vessels offshore.

Jade soon put away the big camera and switched to the phone for pictures --

In this crush, the Samsung Galaxy camera was just as good! And --

-- the closer to the food you got, the harder it was to find a picture...

...or a place to sit, or get out of the sun.

Wow -- take the picture, quick! There's activity on the beach ... people, and all!

The weather for the Beachside Food & Wine Festival can be summed up in one word: HOT! It was almost the first really hot day of the season, and Christies Beach was hopping. The event usually draws a big crowd, apparently, and this year ... well, if we had to guess, we'd say the organizers were caught unawares.

The perfect weather plus the sand sculpture exhibition, organized by Sandstorm Events, about 15 whole meters away from the first of the food and wine, brought a lot more people than they appear to have expected. You could deduce this from the clues at hand, to quote Mr. Holmes, because ...

Well, no place to park, for a start. We wound up a kilometer away, up a hill. Not enough shade, by a long shot, especially in this kind of heat. Nowhere to sit! Many people (ourselves included) were standing to eat lunch, in the shade of our own hats. Take note, Festival Organizers: think through your parking and seating for the 2014 event!

The One and All was offshore ... she's a training ship, built at North Haven, on the Port River, in 1985 ... see her website right here. And she was only one of many vessels out on the water. You saw everything from kayaks to some of the big fishing charter boats. And on the beach itself, camels and ponies for the kids. And the big kids. Dave would have been on a camel, if the day hadn't been so hot, and the lines had been a tad shorter. The same entrepreneurs organize camel rides at Victor Harbor in the summer, too. Now, there's a thought...

The biggest challenge was the NOISE!!! Heaven alone knows who or what the live band was supposed to be, but they were so far over-amped, with loudspeakers every 20 meters along the waterfront, your whole body vibrated with the "music." Jade quickly plugged the ears with wet tissue, and it was absolutely bizarre: mostly deaf, body vibrating fiercely. Note to Festival Organizers: turn it down a  bit next year!

Dave got some very nice local wines (including a Moscato to die for), and we had Korean and Spanish food (spring roll, kebabs, paella), and Jamaican lime tea, which were nice. The food was along the lines of "ethnic fast food" -- interesting, gave you a chance to try something you wouldn't ordinarily have.

So Jade quickly put away the big camera and switched to the Samsung Galaxy's little 5MP camera, built right into the phone. All the longer shots you see in this post were done with the Fuji Finepix HS10; the last five images -- people; and that one shot of the beach -- are from the phone! Thy don't have quite the resolution of the "real" camara, but dang, it's handy to be able to take simple shots from the palm of your hand!

Will we do the event next year? Hmmm. Depends ... on the weather, the parking, and the band. Put it this way, if you're cruising half a mile away, looking desperately for anyplace to park the Millennium Possum, and the band sounds loud even from there -- keep right on cruisin' and go for coffee. You could do worse than The Boat Shed, at Hallett Cove, and we'll take you there in an upcoming post.