One week in Adelaide

One week is barely long enough to get an introduction to a place like Adelaide. We did our best, visiting Hahndorf, walking around historic Port Adelaide, tasting wine in the Barossa Valley and McLaren Vale, and visiting beaches, despite a bit of rain. The drought in South Australia is so bad that we can’t begrudge farmers what they need.

Our Airbnb in Sellicks Beach was a good outpost for exploration. We watched sunset from the second floor deck and listened to the flock of cockatoos twittering in the nearby pines.

We knew there was a lot of wine produced near Adelaide, but we had no idea how many wine regions are crammed into this relatively small area. We were very close to McLaren Vale, where we tasted wine at a couple of different places. We did the same in the Adelaide Hills, and of course, the Barossa Valley, perhaps the best-known of all. Some marvelous wine came to light. The more places we visited, the more suggestions we received about other wineries. So much wine, so little time!

We had some surprising wildlife encounters along the way. After looking for kangaroos and seeing a very few, we passed a field of them.

Even closer to home we passed a field of at least 1,000 Little Corella cockatoos. The birds were playing, fighting over sticks, all flocking together, waiting for the sunset (?).

We spent an afternoon in Hahndorf, a small town with many well-preserved stone houses. The area was started as a German Lutheran outpost and today is a lively tourist destination, full of shops and cafes. It makes a nice visit.

Historic Port Adelaide has a self-guided walking tour map that takes you past local stores and many large murals. I stopped to chat with a woman putting the finishing touches on hers. The community hosts muralists every two years and has just added another dozen in 2019. This area, so close to the downtown of Adelaide, makes me think of Fremantle. Port Adelaide may be the next hip community in South Australia. It looks up and coming, with lots of new housing and businesses opening.

On Saturday morning, we stopped at the Willunga Farmer’s Market, one of our favorites in all of Australia. The market had really lovely local produce. It’s not all food stalls and perfumed soap. When I commented to a woman about how much we enjoyed and appreciated the range of products, she told us the secret. Vendors are carefully vetted and get a stall based on a point system that rates whether all their products are local, whether their ingredients are local, foods made and cooked locally, with an effort to have everything that is sold there come from a maximum of 100 km away. The more local a product, the more likely the vendor is to get a space.

Willunga contrasted sharply with the other farmers market we visited. The Torrens Island market is a farmers market in an older sense of the word to my way of thinking. It’s a place where produce is sold at the end of the week (Saturday) and it consists of what is left over from wholesalers. We didn’t buy much, but the prices were about half what you’d pay at the grocery store, and much less than most farmers markets, as most have gotten very upscale in their pricing. Torrens Island is the opposite of boutique. It’s held on a scrap of raw land in an industrial zone that makes you happy to see other cars parked in the lot. Booths are stacks of crates, truck beds, and an occasional canopy. You can buy a coffee, but there are none of the food stalls that crowd out the merchandise at other markets. It’s a bare bones operation in a bare setting. Jonathan asked the people parked beside us what they planned to do with the crate of tiny potates they were loading into the trunk of their car. The man said, “We’ll eat some, give some away, and toss the rest. I couldn’t pass them up, they were only two dollars!”

Like all our other stops in Australia, there were gorgeous beaches. Sellicks Beach was our local, but we had a great visit to Port Elliot and to the beaches beyond on the barrier island at the mouth of the Murray River. We even saw a stubby lizard on the dunes.

With all our stops and strolls, I still feel there was a lot more to see and do in this area.