A Year of Work and Exploration in Australia: Adelaide

Finally we reached Adelaide. Adelaide itself is a really pretty city. The fifth largest city in Australia, with a population of 1.3 million, it still seemed reasonably small and quiet - especially compared with Melbourne and Sydney. It is the capital city of South Australia and is essentially old, Georgian and Victorian-style buildings laid out around a large number of botanic gardens and parks. It's called the City of Churches and we found that to be accurate - there is a large number of churches and church style buildings! It's ranked as Australia's most livable city and constantly ranked within the world's top-ten livable cities, such is the quality of life. It's busy without being chaos and the wide, open, park-flanked streets make it the polar opposite of madness-inducing Sydney.

On our first day, we wandered the city. We visited the excellent (and free) South Australian Museum, walked past some memorials and had lunch in Adelaide Botanic Garden.

We walked down past the Adelaide Oval (the major sporting ground in Adelaide) and the River Torrens:

The next day, we visited the hipster beachside suburb of Glenelg. Glenelg is essentially a mini-Bournemouth or Brighton, a seaside escape with lots of small boutique shops, bars and restaurants:

Glenelg - with the memorial in the centre.

After Glenelg, we popped over to Adelaide Gaol to do a tour of the prison: South Australia's first purpose built jail. It is South Australia's oldest building - a title it shares with Government House, which was built at the same time. It was a working prison from 1841 right the way up to 1988. The jail was a bit of a financial disaster for the new, fledgling South Australia colony - it's construction cost $10.7 million dollars in today's money - a fifth of the entire colony's startup budget. Nonetheless, it opened and ran right up until one year before we were born!