Planning a Trip to Adelaide

adelaide is great any time pf year but for the best time go during a festival. the streets come alive and there is heaps moreto do!

Open air shopping Malls in Australia all seem to be the same and most towns and cities have several. A pedestrianised street runs along a few blocks in the middle of the town and is lined with shops, cafes and restaurants. As there are no cars allowed, there's no need to cross the street or wait for the lights to change so you can spend a carefree afternoon just browsing, drinking or hanging out to watch other people browsing and drinking. More and more malls in Australia are adding wireless internet access, which means that it's also becoming increasingly common to see people sitting about on benches using their laptop and surfing the web, quite often for free. Rundle Mall in Adelaide is a large multi-storey undercover shopping centre, and is by far the largest I've seen for a while - in fact, it is considered by some to be the largest shopping precinct in Australia. Outside on the street, just in case you've got so caught up in the shopping and forgotten just how surreal Australia can be, visitors are welcomed by the sight of two giant stainless steel balls (The Mall's Balls) piled one on top of the other for no adequately explored reason. Inside, the place is huge - the entire ground floor is a food court selling every type of food imaginable, and above it are six floors containing every type of shop under the sun from supermarkets to sex shops. Next door is a smaller food court in which, when I returned here with Tanya in 2002, we spent virtually every day sitting and eating donuts and banana smoothies - something which vendors in Britain seem unable to make. Smoothies in Australia are generally made out of real fruit, and you can watch them stuff bananas into a blender and create the smoothie in front of you - in Britain, on the other hand, there seems to be a tendency to use banana flavour ice cream, which isn't quite the same thing. Adelaide is also famous for its statues. Wherever you go in the city, you'll find everything from statues recalling famous figures from Australian history to the bizarre street art that springs up everywhere. On the pedestrian precinct outside Rundle Mall, litter bins along the street are decorated with full size bronze statues of pigs standing on their hind legs and nosing through the rubbish, other bronze pigs just standing around waiting their turn. These pigs, I have learned since, all have names - Truffles, Horatio, Oliver and Augusta, should you wish to say Hello on your way through. Central Market is a large and diverse area of the city in which you can buy virtually anything you fancy to eat from the tons of speciality stalls selling anything from Cheese to Thai food. You can sit down to eat at a restaurant or scamper from stall to stall bargaining with the cheerful local vendors over vegetables you've never even heard of. The Market is surrounded by cafes, restaurants, fish and chip shops, and with Chinatown just around the corner you could easily spend your day browsing here and go straight on for a meal and a night out afterwards without having to go home in between.

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A lovely beach a special tram ride through the suburbs of Adelaide. Great to stay at or for a day out for lunch and some shopping.

Hire a car and drive on the Great Ocean Road to Melbourne, or use the Grampian Mountains as a base to explore a new section of the Road each day.

Great wee place this we stayed at a little place called Macclesfield at a friends grandmothers place nestled in the trees. the bird life is incredible Galahs and colourful parrot things. Went to a little german town Hahndorf - such a pretty place. Shopping in Adelaide was great.

Must try a Pie Floater.....Aussie Meat Pie turned upside down in a bowl of pea soup...with tomato sauce....awesome!!!!

If you want to see great sunsets only 30 minutes from the city center, Henley beach is the place to go. On sunday nights Henley square is lit up and buskers/ entertainers/ musicians frequent it. Gormet food and bars are offered for great prices.

Beautiful city easy to get around due to grid like design.