Ramble
Quest - Adelaide, Flinder's Range, and Heysen Trail Snippets.
A lot of time is spent on buses and ferries as I make a beeline for Adelaide, enough time to read most of "Gone With The Wind" on the way. I check into Sunny's, which is a decent enough place except for the fact that they have a few scummy people who seem to stay there permanently. So I move over to the YHA, which is generally good except that I have two days where my keycard constantly doesn't work and an obnoxious night manager there can't seem to do anything about it.
Once everything is all sorted out, I'm very pleased with Adelaide, much as I'd expected to be with Melbourne. All the tourist type things here seem to be just a shade better: the central market, the botanic gardens, the museums, and the river bike paths. Plus it is far less congested! I take a long ride on the bike path one day, out to the very end towards the Barossa side, and then up into hilly, winding roads. I'm tempted to push on to Barossa but my crummy YHA bike isn't up to it.
So, I get to the Barossa Valley by bus on another day, visiting some of the wineries there. I also stop by the famous "whispering wall" which is an old (1902) dam with amazing acoustic properties, letting you clearly hear conversations 140+ meters away. I get it into my head that I might want to do the Heysen Trail some day, a long 1500+ km trek through South Australia. So, I do a bit of scouting, hiking short sections of it, including the stretch in Barossa. Another section is out by Mt. Lofty, and I hike from there over to the other botanic gardens in that area. This is a great area with very few people frequenting it. The botanic gardens are well watered in sections, contrasting them greatly with their dry surroundings. It's been even drier than usually here lately, "drier than a nun's nasty" as I've heard. I also visit the Flinder's Range, which has several long sections of the Heysen. I book transportation there with a company called CampWild, which does a nice job of bringing a small group out to Flinder's and giving them the flexibility to do what they want. Besides Flinder's we also stopped at Alligator Gorge in Mt. Remarkable NP. We camped out under the stars (almost never rains here) atop swags at Brachina Gorge and Bunyeroo, near Wilpena Pound. I split from the group for a day to climb St. Mary's Peak, which was a thrilling hike with incredible views. I got to do several stretches of the Heysen as well. This entire Flinder's Range area is just fantastic, reminding me a bit of the American southwest. One day I'm reminded of how different it is when I look up and see what appears to be dinosaurs in the distance. As I get closer I see that it is a herd of wild camels, massive single-humped beasts that live in the desert. I also saw multitudes of kangaroos, emu, wild goats and sheet, rock dragons, large skinks, and the huge wedge-tailed eagles. We search for the rare yellow-footed rock walleby in Buckaringa Gorge but they elude us. All in all, a great trip.