Walcott

Adelaide, South Australia

It's starting to get a little bit commonplace for me these days... this Friday night rush to get away from Sydney in order to be some place far far away, for the sake of pleasure. This Friday was certainly no different. After Virgin Blue re-scheduled flights, it meant I had about an hour to get a bus ride home, pick up sticks and jump in a cab. Not too bad - but when the cab showed up 25minutes late - the pressure was well and truly on. We did make it to check in however, and then I munched through an overdue lunch (at 6.30pm), only to find out our flights were to be delayed until the time we had originally booked them for. Thanks Virgin Blue - and yes, that line of gratitude is laced in pure sarcasm. At least we didn't get routed to another airport with a bus connection to complete the journey like the passengers in the next lounge to us got. You certainly get what you pay for when it comes to air-fares.

Enough ranting, We touched down in Adelaide, South Australia late on Friday night, with the time difference a slightly odd 30mins behind Sydney, a long day was made a tiny bit longer. I ran over the road to a bottle shop and got myself a bottle of Coopers Pale... not a new experience here, but I figured much like the "Guiness tastes better in Dublin" theory, I should do this. And I can verify, it did taste "bloody good". AFL final weekend meant there were footy fans in the hostel, which in turn meant a pretty ropey nights sleep. Regardless, we slept in past the alarm and left ourselves approximately 3minutes to throw clothes on, run some water across our faces and get outside to meet our tour bus.

Minutes later I'd managed to grab some Farmers Union Iced Coffee (a South Australian delicacy!) and a banana to stop-gap me till lunch. Our tour then took us on a meandering tour first out of the city, and then onward through the Adelaide hills. I'm sitting in my seat staring out at a landscape that conjured up images of LOTR movies and of English looking countryside. The grass was lusher than I've ever seen in Australia, the wild flowers were; well the most and brightest I've seen here and then the odd beehive littering the landscape. It all became completely Aussie once more with a sign saying "Horse-poo - $2" however.

We jumped off for our first leg stretch at a toy factory; which is also coincidentally enough home of the worlds largest Rocking Horse and some Aussie wildlife. A little underwhelmed, we headed deeper into the Barossa, past full-to-the-brim lakes (who'd know Australia has a water shortage!?).

Next stop was a man-made phenomenon; at a damn. This damn is nick-named the whispering wall and was so names way back when it was built. Workers on one side were giving their boss a bashing, who was stood on the opposite side. The acoustic properties of the damn meant sound is carried without much loss to the other side, a regular conversation can be held - it's quite unreal. Needless to say the employees were given the boot.

After this, we headed to what I personally would rate one of the best known wine brands in the world today; Jacobs Creek. Over the creek we went, a boggy little stream and soon we were in the show room of the winery. All around us vineyards and one of the most modern buildings I've seen used for the purposes of floggin crushed & matured grapes. We sample some and moved on...

We hit up 3 more wineries where we bought a few bottles, tasted maaany types of wine as well as stopped for an Aussie BBQ along side some bull rushes and a stream. The weather was perfect, and I almost thought I was back in England, in the 80'd when we had such days as this. To re-enforce this - I was also suffering the worst hayfever since my UK days too... I discovered on the way home that Rape Seed is grown locally... that beautiful yellow stuff is my kryptonite, that is, if I were Superman ;)

Most of the tour bus snoozed their way back home to Adelaide after all the wine tasting, myself included. On arrival, the two of us took a long walk from our the place we were staying to the city centre. There was surprisingly little open for a Saturday night, so we headed back to a contemporary place nearby our hostel to have dinner.

To Be Continued...