IT will take a few weeks to tell you all about absolutely amazing Adelaide, mainly because I recently spent three pumping, mind-broadening activity-filled weeks there, during South Australia’s worst heat wave since 1939.
Opinion by Dusty Miller
I need to show as many pictures as possible of the place, so you can share the beauty. An old adage is a picture’s worth a thousand words. That’s untrue. As a photo-journalist and page layout bloke with half-a-century’s experience, I say a picture’s worth about 333 words!
I visited Adelaide over Christmas and New Year because my son and daughter-in-law moved there from bleak, grey, dreich Scotland in early 2012.
Having not set foot outside London Airport since August 1984, I returned for their wedding in historic St Andrews in May 2007 and since then had spent most Hogmanays in Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Kirriemuir or wherever their careers and travels took them. I love Scotland the Brave to bits and my grand-children are just down the road outside Oxford: great reasons to fly there at the end of a wearing year.
Warm atmosphere But Australia, with its wide open spaces, bright blue skies, golden beaches, indigo seas, warm in climate and atmosphere, certainly appealed when invited to stay at their new home last Christmas. In June or July I checked the cost of flying to Adelaide, capital of South Australia, named after Queen Adelaide (of Saxe-Meiningen), the consort of King William IV. She lived between 1792 and 1849. It was too costly then, flying to Perth and onwards or to Sydney or Melbourne and back, via Jo’burg or Dubai, or even London. In November something made me re-Google for flight details and the price had plummeted to within my pocket. Why? Because unbeknown to me or my usual travel agent, Emirates had launched direct flights from Dubai to Adelaide on November 1; (now a daily service.) It meant spending 19 hours 50 minutes in Dubai, between the Harare/Lusaka flight landing and Adelaide flight leaving, but that’s never a train smash! Emirates’ GPS I actually spent nearly 48 hours in the Persian Gulf that’s another story with which regular readers are familiar. Thanks to the personal seat-back GPS on Emirates flights I clocked the second we crossed the border between Western and South Australia. A long mid-summer twilight allowed us to see a panorama of deserts and lush farms, mountains and forests, the odd river, lake and dam and a spectacular meandering coastline clearly from 38 000 feet. It goes without saying that the continent, island, country of Australia is mind-bogglingly massive and South Australia itself at 1 043 514 square kilometres is nearly three times the area of Zimbabwe’s 386 050 sq km. And with a population of only 1 656 000 (as opposed to our non-diaspora figure of 12 million) there’s loads of SPACE for everyone. This was particularly noticeable on the miles and miles of unspoiled—almost unoccupied — beaches. Pristine beaches Even on Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s Day we were able to park (free of charge) within a hundred metres or so of the sparkling clean, pristine, shark-free beach we wished to explore, enjoy and possibly picnic on. Once or twice we were alone; mainly there was no more than two or three dozen folk within two or three hundred metres and only on the odd occasion were there more than about two hundred people visual. In this series I’ll tell you all about fascinating and beautiful Greater Adelaide, its history from a site chosen in 1836 by Colonel William Light besides the Torrens River for Australia’s first free colony (as opposed to a penal settlement for British criminals) to the present; architecture, people, food, drink, climate, animals, sport, culture and the most spectacular birdlife I’ve witnessed in a lifetime’s travelling. [email protected]
