UP THE LAZY RIVER

There are many things you don’t expect to encounter when you’re riding along a popular bike track: a cemetery is one of them.

Adelaide isn’t enormous and it’s easy to get around. 14kms from the city centre lies the Adelaide Hills to the east, and the beaches to the south. With such gorgeous weather lately staying inside doesn’t really seem an option, so on Sunday we rented bikes from one of the city bike centres and headed to the coast. Note: I use ‘rent’ in the loosest form of the term; there’s no charge for bikes and the only collateral you’re expected to leave is a drivers’ licence. Rent is from sun-up to sun-down and as long as you don’t plan on using your licence, holding on to the bike overnight isn’t a huge concern either. This is never a concern for me: I once had an out of date licence for four years in NSW, and this March I renewed it when I realised I was moving to SA: it was supposed to be done in January 2009!! Spot the reluctant driver….

I had slight reservations about getting on a bike in such a public manner after my last attempt (see my McLaren Vale post for an in-depth, blow-by-blow description of my encounter with a ditch). The bikes for rent aren’t exactly made for small people: they probably weighed the same as me, and with the seat all the way down I was still on tip-toes trying to get on. I looked for a positive, and found one: this was the Volvo of bikes. If it was me versus big dog/large bush/brick wall, this monster was going to make sure victory would be mine.

The beauty of discovering a new city is that tourists, or locals/would-be tourists have a greater tendency to be adventurous. The cars are left at home, the hesitation to see areas that were also thought of as boring is lost, and the admittedly lazy outlook of most of us is forgotten. We tend to live our lives in a small circumference of convenience: our supermarket is the closest one; we travel the same way to and from work; we stick to activities that are close by, or easy, or involve the same people every week. I’ve been guilty of it for years: living in Sydney I can remember spending the majority of my time in the same three suburbs, never really going much further than 5kms in any direction. As soon as we got on the bikes on Sunday, we discovered a park not more than 2kms from our house that we’d never noticed before. This was a proper ‘Japanese bridge’ park, with ducks to feed, a kiosk with decent coffee and chocolate muffins, row boats on a lake and kites. How did we miss this?!?! As we kept riding, we found more and more little gems in the city that we’d never bothered to stop to look at before. In our 42km river ride, here’s some of the highlights:

Sunday Petanqúe, Adelaide city parklands.

Not lawn bowls in a bowling club; boules on a specially designed traditional boules area in the park, a lá Paris. By 10:30am they looked like they meant business. I can honestly say that outside of a trip to France in summer years ago, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a boules congregation in a public park before. It was absolutely beautiful to see; sun shining, bare trees blowing, little old men and ladies in their red jumpers and tweed hats wandering amongst the boules with tape measures.

Adelaide Zoo and the River Torrens

The zoo is fairly new, state of the art and the home to the only giant pandas in Australia. It’s set back behind the botanic gardens, right on the river. A tree full of kookaburras drowned out any exotic animal noises, but it definitely is now on the hit-list of things to do. And when I say ‘tree of kookaburras’, I mean 7-8 of them going nuts and squawking at once. Either they hate people riding on bikes underneath them, or the cockatoos that were going nuts in the other tree were annoying them. NOISY PARK. I’m saving my trip to visit Wang Wang and Fumi the pandas and their friends until late July. Continuing along the river, you’ll find more picture book bridges and gardens, with barges available for tours on the water and colourful paddle boats for hire. I’m sounding biased, but honestly the River Torrens has got a bit of a Mary Poppins chalk drawing feel about it: dancing penguins and a race on roundabout horses must be reserved for next weekend! We also managed to pass the Adelaide Ferrari Club, which is essentially a whole lot of people with no money left after they’ve bought their oversized matchbox cars standing around a random carpark looking at everyone else’s identical oversized matchbox car. I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do on a Sunday….hmmm….

Torrens Linear Park

Essentially just the grassy bit next to the river, the linear park continues from inner city Hindmarsh out towards Henley Beach. Highlights (after from grass stains and public bbq’s) include possibly Australia’s most random park monuments- the Lions Club sponsored Hindmarsh section, who’s installation includes ‘large plastic tree with cartoon galahs’ and ‘man in loincloth inside volcano, hammering’. Well that’s my name for them: I don’t like to mince words. The photos speak for themselves. Further down the track, as we meandered along the river we also had the opportunity to ride pretty much straight through a cemetery. If there was a place to crash and burn on a bike, large concrete gravestones would definitely have to symbolise something. In terms of bizarreness, the cemetery track was matched only by the bike track cutting through Adelaide Gold Course on the way back. Yep, that’s right: one minute you’re on a regular path, the next minute you’re ducking golf balls. No mistakes, no accidental turns; I think they figure that we should be wearing helmets, so technically we’re safe. Nobody gave a thought to how safe the golfers would be with disoriented cyclists coming at them from nowhere though, did they?

Henley Beach

Of course, the whole point of the ride was to make it to the sea. As the path gets closer to the ocean, the land on either side widens as the mouth of the river narrows. Locals have turned the land into horse pastures and people can have picnics under huge trees, with kids riding on bikes and talking to horses over the fence. 500m up the road you have Henley Beach, less built up than Glenelg and without the thousands of tourists. Just inside the mouth of the estuary, a pelican was sitting next to a fisherman waiting for scraps. It seems even the wildlife is enjoying retirement at the beach. Long jetties reach out from the beach into the sea, providing a glorious (and very windy) way to enjoy the smell of the sea and take in sunsets over the water. As an easterner, watching a sunset over the ocean is still a bit of a novelty.

Once back home I couldn’t help but marvel that I a) managed to avoid getting hit by cars as I laboriously dragged my tank bike across the roads; b) did not fall down a set of steps towards the river when I was very close to doing so; and c) avoided flying golf balls and didn’t take out those two golfers that were recklessly standing within 5mts of my bike as I charged through the park. 5 metres is simply not enough room: everybody who’s seen me on a bike knows that!

Wine of the week: Kangarilla Road 2010 Chardonnay (left over in the cupboard from our McLaren Vale weekend)

For all your cycling info while in South Australia:

http://www.bikesa.asn.au/

I found a fabulous website that lists all the petanqúe (boules) clubs in Australia, including Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne – start planning some days out, guys!

http://home.alphalink.com.au/~bigfoot/prod02.htm

Bike trails and walking trails for South Australia, including the River Torrens trail

http://www.southaustraliantrails.com/top_trails.asp?torrens

South Australia Tourism’s page on Adelaide parks, including our new favourite: Elder Park

http://www.southaustralia.com/AdelaideParksAndGardens.aspx

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GIVE WAY TO PENGUINS

June is one of my favourite times of the year. I love the change in seasons, I love winter fires, and I particularly love the long weekend that always falls on the second Monday of the month. The Queen’s birthday weekend is the one that I tend to be a bit more adventurous on, and has lead to some pretty interesting trips: I can’t help but remember the year when Ross and I decided to drive to Tamworth from Sydney and got caught in flooded waters in Muswellbrook and fog that came straight from a John Carpenter film over the Great Dividing Range near Murrurundi. It was the first time I’d seen snow as close as it was to the town at that time of the year, and it was also a fairly eventful weekend for others: many in Newcastle will remember it as the weekend they finally got a (albeit temporary) tourist hot spot with the Pasha Bulker running aground. Oh how they flocked to that one…….

  

For our 2011 winter long weekend, we drifted to regional South Australia, heading east down the Fleurieu Peninsula. It’s one of the oldest regions of the state, and the eastern coast has a notorious history as being part of the successful whaling industry in the 1800s. It’s also home to the mouth of the famous, much loved and maligned Murray River. We headed towards Strathalbyn via the Adelaide Hills, with a view to be there by lunch. Maps of South Australia need to be treated like cars with side windows: ‘Objects may be closer than they appear’. I thought it would take us 2 hours to get to Strathalbyn; 45 minutes later I was dragging Ross through every antique shop I could find! Alas, I wasn’t in the market for a Charles and Diana commemorative wedding plate or a hideously tacky Toby jug, so we left empty handed. (Toby jugs are the ones that are sculpted ceramic in the shape of a character’s face and then hand painted. Highly sought after and collectable, I personally find them the height of tack-a-rama. They can fetch upwards of $500, so apparently others don’t agree with me.) The town of Strathalbyn is unbelievably quaint. The River Angas cuts it in half, with the historic old centre on one side (complete with sandstone bank buildings and antiques shops galore) and the new centre on the other. A beautiful church stands just near the main park right on the river for ample duck feeding opportunities. Just under 4000 people live in the main town, with nearby Langhorne Creek and Currency Creek wine areas making up extra numbers and tourism opportunities. It was here that we would be based for two nights while we explored other areas of the peninsula.

Strathalbyn is just a little bit……odd. Borrowing a line from Dennis Denuto, it’s ‘the vibe’. It’s gorgeous, it’s very twee, but there’s just an overriding sense of ‘you’re not from around here’ that seems to permeate when you arrive. Only one restaurant in town (another warning sign: it wasn’t a Chinese… something is definitely wrong here), four pubs in town and the same five people in each pub that we went to meant we ended up enjoying a ‘quiet night in’ barricading the doors the second night.

As a base for exploring, Strathalbyn is brilliant. Langhorne Creek is a stone’s throw away, and as one of the less well known wine regions you won’t be lining up for tastings or competing with others for spots. Twenty minutes driving south will take you to Milang and Lake Alexandrina, where the Murray flows before reaching its final resting place on the coast. Cold weather and windy days meant the lake was relatively quiet. Further down south, you will eventually reach Goolwa, perched on the banks of the Murray. Paddle steamers operate tours, and Hindmarsh Island (a large island in the middle of Lake Alexandrina) is accessible via bridge. Goolwa is also a station on the famous SteamRanger train line; South Australia’s first railway (and Australia’s second: yep, Goolwa and Victor Harbour had a train line before Sydney did. How’s that for progressive?!).

This is where the fun bit of the trip starts. From the day we moved down here, I’ve tried to keep the attitude of exploring South Australia without relying on maps or Wikipedia for tourist information. We just wanted to ‘drift’ from place to place, without making huge plans or exhaustive itineraries (hence the title of the blog). We knew we wanted to see Victor Harbour and Goolwa, but at no stage had either Ross or myself actually stopped to read about the towns, so we had no idea there was a train line connecting the two. When Ross discovered the train was a steam engine and only took 40 minutes to reach Victor Harbour, I thought he was about to wet himself! Plans for driving around the whole day were abandoned, and the train was our new mode of transport. On top of having a fully functioning steam train on hand, Goolwa also turned out to be the surprise home of the Steam Exchange brewery; people who read my post on Adelaide will notice a photo of Ross sampling a boutique beer, which happens to be a Steam Exchange variety! Add into that a railway souvenir shop run by an almost blind granny and you have a tourism winner. Our challenge of finding the daggiest ornament for our display cabinet was well and truly fulfilled with the purchase of not one, but two new additions: a goggley eyed stone with a crocheted Adelaide Crows beanie, and a goggley eyed walnut in Port Adelaide colours (to dispel favouritism). Ross also made sure he grabbed a take away beer from the brewery before we headed off on the train.

The train line cuts across a small strip of the peninsula, before eventually following the coast down to Victor Harbour with views of sandstone pioneering huts on one side, and dairy cows dry humping above the ocean on the other (don’t laugh, I’m not kidding: the strangest part of the whole weekend was walking away knowing I’ve now witnessed a bull mounting a cow, while I was riding a steam train). VH is a popular seaside town at the bottom of the state, connected to Granite Island via a horse drawn tram line. It’s the stuff of children’s holidays: mini golf, camel rides, Shetland ponies, jumping castles and hot dog stands, right next to the beach which has a permanent beach volleyball court, croquet club and lawn bowls club. 


We walked out to Granite Island in the hope of seeing penguins. The Little Penguin is a native to Australian and New Zealand waters, and is the smallest in the penguin family. Consequently, it’s also the easiest to catch, and each year the number of breeding pairs grows smaller; whether this is due to a reduction in fish for food, or an increase in fur seals (who’s favourite meal is little penguin sashimi) isn’t really known. Granite Island currently has approximately 77 breeding pairs who come back every night after a hard day fishing. The penguin centre houses some of the not so lucky ones (or perhaps extra lucky ones), who almost ended up as lunch. Penguins on Granite Island get right of way: if one crosses your path, humans must stop and not disturb them. No dogs or cats, no overnight stays on the island, and no feeding penguins are some of the rules in place to protect them. We spent the whole day wandering around the island and enjoying the view.
The trams take passengers all the way up to the main information centre on Granite Island, and are pulled by Clydesdale horses, making for a beautiful view of old fashioned service against the backdrop of wild seas. And just to make the day even more perfect and unimaginable, a pod of dolphins decided to join us for lunch, catching fish and causing havoc for the local fishermen just off the rocks! If you’d told me I’d be sitting down enjoying wine while watching dolphins play in the ocean, I wouldn’t have believed it. I also wouldn’t have believed it if you’d told me I’d be aiming a golf ball at a whale’s backside, but it’s rural South Australia, so stranger things have occurred!

Wine of the week: 2007 Bremerton Wines Coulthard Cabernet Sauvignon

Check out the Granite Island website for info on penguins, cormorants and history

http://www.graniteisland.com.au/

Information on the Goolwa Barrages and the Murray River mouth

http://www.murrayriver.com.au/river-towns/barrages/

Strathalbyn Villas, our beautiful base for two days.

http://www.strathalbynvillas.com.au/

The famous SteamRanger train line and the Cockle Train

http://www.steamrangerheritagerailway.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=9&Itemid=5

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WHAT A BUNCH OF CORKS

I’ve done it. I’ve finally escaped Adelaide city, and headed out into the regional areas of South Australia. And now I can add another wine region to the list of ‘been there, done that, going back again’ experiences. Three years ago, on our last trip to SA we’d cycled the Reisling trail in the Clare Valley; we’d dodged old railway tracks and rabbits, and wobbled between some of the country’s oldest wineries on a cold, but very memorable day. With 50% of Australia’s wine produced within 200kms of Adelaide, we couldn’t exactly ignore the rest of the vineyards. Why, it would practically be rude not to! McLaren Vale is nothing short of glorious. It’s a tiny region that saddles the back of the Adelaide hills, and the sea. The locals have the option of drinking themselves silly in vineyards and then relaxing in some of the state’s best beaches. 

We’d decided that again, the best way to have a guilt-free booze fest was to disguise it with exercise, so we’d picked a mountain bike tour of the region. Our fellow byclers for the day were Crispin and Jane, with guide Ian; while his wife Deb and 7mth old Charlotte followed us in the van to make sure no one became the latest roadkill. I thought I was clever wearing black jeans and layers on the trip to beat the chill in the air. As soon as we drove to the forest at the top of the hill, the rain and the mud indicated that my jeans would soon be covered in muddy skid marks, and I’d have the all over smell of ‘wet dog’ following me in my lovely damp woollen cardigan all day with a hair style to match. 


The emergency poncho (bright coloured plastic thing resembling an oversized garbage bag) was just a tad too hideous to break out in public. Freezing on a bike in the middle of a forest in a new state where no one knows me simply isn’t a good enough reason to commit a crime of fashion!

With the smell of pinecones, we headed down the forest, making our way to the valley below. Cycling through the area is a great way to get out, take your time between wineries, get some exercise and escape the confines of more rigid tour bus operated tours. Not only do you earn every drop you drink, but you get to see and experience views that aren’t possible on the main roads, like the group of friendly alpacas who wandered up for a closer look when we tried to take photos! EXTREME CLOSEUP!!

Our wineries for the day were Kangarilla Road and Pertaringa; Kangarilla is particularly well known for its reds – the Zinfandel is nothing short of amazing. A bottle of that, and a few others were loaded in the back of the van, while we all took off with much more bravado and much less common sense, hooning down the streets debating the quality of Glee and Justin Bieber. I think it’s fair to say that once you have a bunch of 30-somethings getting deep and meaningful about the Beiber, a long ride and a big lunch to soak the tastings up is probably needed. Ian and Deb didn’t disappoint, with a fabulous antipasto spread laid out at Pertaringa, while the tastings came to us at our table to save us the hassle of joining the crowd inside: how’s that for service!!!

More wine in the back of the van (a white, and a dessert), and we headed to  into the main town of McLaren Vale, for coffee and cake and a big lie down. The boys zipped off ahead of us again, leaving Jane and I to take in the countryside and negotiate the ultimate ‘hill of death’ at a slow and steady pace – my experience on bikes meant that taking a hill at steep and gravelly as that would more than likely lead to certain injury (and embarrassment). We hit the town, and had completely lost them. Riding towards the main road, I was really pleased to see the final destination, and to have had the most successful bike ride yet!

But I should have known better.

Just as we were about to reach the road, I decided it was the perfect time to disengage ‘watch where you’re going’ mentality, and I turned to have a chat to Jane, while my bike continued to move forward. As I turned my head to look out in front, I heard Jane yell ‘watch out!!’ in slow motion behind me, and saw the front wheel slide into the embankment (I say slide; it was more like ‘cycle furiously into the embankment’). With my lightning reflexes (who’s got tiger blood now, Charlie?), the bike went down, while I hopped off and avoided total humiliation.

Crisis averted, coffee wasn’t going to cut it: so once at Oxenberry Cafe, I opted for a glass of fortified wine to wash down the cake (and calm the nerves).

A fabulous day out complete, Ross and I finally had a stash of local vino in the cupboard, and a new experience of South Australia under our belt!! McLaren Vale has been elevated to one of the two best wine region experiences I’ve had so far (the other one was in Victoria, so we won’t mention that here). I made a great new friend in Jane, and as a bonus, the poncho decision turned out to be an excellent prediction of sorts: I found out when I got home that Ian had been sneakily posting photos of the trip on facebook while we were out. I think everyone that saw them would agree the helmet, silly riding gloves and woolly fringe would have clashed completely with my gorgeous raspberry plastic bin liner.

Thanks to Ian, Deb and Charlotte for hosting a great day. Check out their other tours here: http://escapegoat.com.au/

Next time you’re in SA in June, make sure you hit Sea and Vines in McLaren Vale. 
The local wineries open their doors to entertainment and gourmet cuisine, with special and celebrity guest chefs cooking for the public.
 Details on the 2011 event below:
http://www.mclarenvale.info/banksaseaandvines

It wouldn’t be fair to pick one, so here are both cellar doors we visited:

http://www.kangarillaroad.com.au/default.asp

http://www.pertaringa.com.au/home

Wine of the week: Kangarilla Road 2009 Zinfandel; Pertaringa Full Fronti fortified Muscat (gold medal wine)

Book of the week: Chai for Beginners, Jane Ainslie. I got to spend a day cycling with the author, so make sure you check it out on Amazon!

http://soniareviews.wordpress.com/2011/03/29/book-review-of-chai-for-beginners-by-jane-ainslie/

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