Category: South Australia

Australia, Cycling, South Australia, Trans Oceania

TransOceania: A trundle down Rundle

No glass work here

To continue a thread aka rabbit hole: time zones. These can be traced back to the standardisation of train times from 1840 onwards. Great Western kicked it off, using GMT as the standard instead of the local station time which was based on solar time. It took until 1880 for a unified time system in the UK to be legally adopted. 1884 saw a Washington conference adopting 24 times zones for the world. A few places resist – such as this Australian State. Now you know, an even briefer history of time.

We spent today learning the buses, admiring the Adelaide grid pattern and some fancy glassware in the Botanic Gardens. Rundle Street just happens to like a t.

Clear lines
Variety of ages
Useful coding
Purple not as popular

Buses: frequent and cheap. 50p for 2 hours travel on all city routes. A free bus around the perimeter of the central city district. A bus driver who forgot to remind us to get off.  He then told us he’d called the bus on the other side of the street who was waiting for us.

A city developing from around 1832 on a specific design of wide avenues, a grid system and parks. Which persists until today. Relatively quiet roads, indeed the traffic is light generally. The Central Market is a proper working one – lots of colour and noise. The Portuguese tarts maybe a new addition, long may they last.

The main destination was the Botanic Gardens and its new exhibition of glasswork by Chihuly. Which opens tomorrow. Primarily a “lit” experience, we did see the bulk of the work throughout the park in the daytime. Colourful bobbles. Before I got my eye in, I thought I was looking at plastic bags covering something until I realised it was a genuine “hooly”. They were impressive, especially for blown glass – he must have long arms and large lungs.

Chihuly in the Botanic Garden – daylight

Getting to grips with the wildlife too. Ibis are akin to our seagulls. Magpies are magpies except white and black. Ducks are ducks and chicks are cute. Parakeets look more natural here than London and blend in better. Not too many dogs.

Great street art
Water lily
Scavenging
Blends in well

Bike inspection prompted by Barbara’s badly damaged transport box has, thankfully, shown no visible damage. My inspection, prompted by the simple 10 minute it takes to add an eSim for data to Barbara’s phone turning into 100 with messages from BT saying your phone is about to self destruct, has shown no visible damage. Just internal bruising. Thanks for asking……

Australia, Cycling, South Australia, Trans Oceania

TransOceania, the Australia leg. A preamble.

TransOceania, the Australian leg.

To paraphrase the TDA blurb:

“Pedaling across southeastern Australia, Tasmania…..the multitude of experiences will be hard to fathom: pleasant wine regions, limestone coast of the Great Ocean Road, fascinating cities of Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney.

From Adelaide the cyclists will cruise along the coast on the gorgeous Great Ocean Road, stopping in Melbourne and its arts and coffee scenes. A ferry will bring the riders to Tasmania, where they will experience white sand beaches, rocky headlands, alpine lakes, and misty mountains. Back on the mainland, they will now climb up into the ‘Australian Alps’ before swinging down through Canberra, the country’s capital, and on into cosmopolitain Sydney.”

TDA is the company we’ve used for other trips like this. There’s about 15 starting, so we should have remembered names before Sydney.

The Australian leg is 3500km. Which is of course correct, as Australia converted from miles to kilometres on 1 July 1974. Our conversion remains 5/8 so it’s about 2200 miles to the Imperialists. To keep things simple for visitors from the UK they remain on the left – we hope.

A smooth journey overall, once the wonderful BA assistant Cris (with no h), had wrangled the check-in system to the floor to allow us to book our bikes on at the airport. “You can’t add the extra bag on- line beforehand as the leg to Sydney is on a different airline”. But you sold us one ticket that covers both airlines. “Don’t be smart with us – and anyway it’s a cinch to add the extra bag at the airport check-in”. A sweaty 30+ minutes wait watching Cris’ eyebrows be his only expression of worry. A work around was found.

Having taken approaching 24 hours flying to Adelaide from Heathrow, you do have to wonder and admire the early Western explorers bobbing across the oceans to get here. “Take a note Walter (the Pigeon). Have reached a large expanse of land with an even bigger beach in the middle. Sent to UK with conviction”.

The impressively smooth transfer at Sydney was somewhat delayed in taking off whilst waiting for a no-show passenger’s bag to be found and removed from the plane’s hold. Dislocating the shoulder of the baggage handler in the process (witness the poor fella surrounded by 6 uniforms of which maybe 2 were medics. Still be grateful it wasn’t one of St John’s specialist forces).

Adelaide is a city of 1.4 million folks. (As the whole state is 1.8 million we can expect a few small towns in days to come:after Adelaide the next largest is 28000). The next few days we’ll be exploring on foot and bus. Foot might take a long time and hazardous. The pedestrian crossings take ages to allow you to cross then change almost with your first step. There’s probably a remote controller in stitches somewhere, watching the clock and reflecting on why this region has a time zone 30 minutes different from Sydney.

To bed…..