A long, hot day in Adelaide

(Alice Springs, Australia, 12th of February 2017)

The bus from Adelaide to Alice Springs did depart 18.00 in the evening so we stayed at our hotel as long as we could. Around 12 we took the bus right outside our hotel and twenty minutes later we were right in the city center. We started by visiting the Central Market, a large indoor market full of stands selling fruits, vegetables, nuts and a lot of other things and many cafes and restaurants. In a camera store we met a Swedish couple (the only Swedes we have met in Australia in addition to those we encountered in Byron Bay) who sailed around the world and had done it for eight years. It was a long and pleasant talk about choosing travelling in front of the usual life at home in Sweden. Then we bought strawberries we enjoyed sitting on a bench before moving on to a park nearby to find some coolness in the shade of a tree. It was still 40 degrees and also though we did not carry any heavy luggage, our small backpacks felt quite uncomfortable after a while. It was not much cooler in the park and after a while we left for the art gallery for some air conditioning and beautiful items.

The Art Gallery was a very beautiful art museum with many interesting exhibits. In addition, they had luggage room so we left our backpacks for a while. As usual, I stuck to sculptures of various kinds, many of which were both imaginative and scary. 

We also saw a movie “RED” by a young artist – very imaginative, horrible and beautiful. Our next goal was the Museum of South Australia, which was located just next to the Art Gallery. Again, a place with both air conditioning and luggage storage! And that entry in all museums is free makes it easy to choose to enter without really knowing what to expect.

The greatest benefit of the Museum of South Australia was definitely the exhibition about the Aboriginals. There were lots of stands with objects, both modern and very old, and movies about their culture and everyday life. It seems that the Aboriginals still live a life that does not really go together with the Australia that we have seen. Although many rituals and objects are no longer relevant in their everyday lives, they have a way of living that feels very ancient and based much on stories that are told from generation to generation. We hope to know more about this when we come up to Alice Springs where many Aboriginals live today.

Our bus to Alice Springs was luckily only half full and we were able to spread us out on two seats each. The road from Adelaide to Alice Springs is very long, straight and quite boring. We had an expectation that it would be very dry and desertlike as soon as we got into the bush but it actually continued to be pretty green almost all the way. The only things to look at was the sunset – which was very beautiful – and some road trains that passed by on the road.

The most exotic thing happened when the driver had to hit the break and we woke up and saw a scared kangaroo in the middle of the road, which happened a few times during the night.

/Christel

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