A Sunday in Adelaide - 12th Dec

We awoke at the YHA with the challenge of booking the next couple of days accommodation as well as seeing Adelaide. The 24 hour internet access we had paid AUD9.95 for was not working and due to it being a Sunday the guy on reception was being really non-committal on when he thought it was going to be fixed – the switching off and on of the server that I suggested did not seem to work!

 Anyway, the fact that the internet was down meant we could not use it to try and understand where to stay over the next 48 hours – we knew we needed to start to make our way south towards the Great Ocean Road and we knew we wanted to visit Hahndorf, Australia's oldest German Settlement, but that was about it.

We decided to head to the Tourist Information with the hope that they would help. They did and within an hour we were to be the proud occupant of a superior room the following evening at The Manna in Hahndorf (suspiciously there was no concept of a standard room).

With that sorted we embarked on seeing Adelaide.

We passed through the main historical/ shopping precincts, surprisingly not that frantic given Christmas was looming, before heading to the South Australian Museum.

The museum had an eclectic mix of exhibitions, from the history of the Aboriginal cultures, to world animals, geological phenomena of Australia, Australian wildlife and Conservation, and of course the deep sea - with their massive squid (for the record not as big as Te Papa, Wellington NZ and no 3D presentation).

Probably the most interesting fact I learnt was that if all the gold suspended in the world's oceans was extracted, it would be enough to give each person in the world 4kg!

The museum had the added benefit of free wifi and we used this to book another nights accommodation, this time in Penola ~ 360km south of Hahndorf.

After this we wandered through the Botanical Gardens. There we saw a tonne of Australia King Parrots and our first Kookaburra.

We then walked along the Torrens river to the Adelaide Oval that had just a week or so ago hosted the second Ashes test. Followed by a walk/ tram ride through town via Victoria Square to the YHA.

In the evening we went to Chinatown and had a meal before heading back to digs to have a coffee in the lounge. It was amazing how many people were either on the internet or texting on the mobile - it makes you wonder how people managed to travel without the aid of such technology.