Adelaide

Just before Mount Gambier on our journey to Adelaide we crossed a line of longitude that took us into South Australia, and bizarrely took our clocks back by just 30 minutes (it took us a while to realise we needed to do that). And so I soon found myself in my fourth state capital city, Adelaide.

To quote Bill Bryson, Adelaide is the driest city in the driest state in the driest country in the driest inhabited continent on the planet. It's quite dry. And yet they still find enough water to maintain over 1,500 acres of parks in the city. If you look at the facts, Adelaide should be a great place. The city centre is nicely laid out, two identical halves opposite each other surrounded by parks that separate it from the suburbs. It has a good tram service, nice beaches such as at Glenelg, it's easy to find things (unlike Melbourne) and has two or three streets that are positively banging at night time. And yet no-one seems to have a good word to say about it, and backpackers often avoid it completely without even seeing it.

I actually liked Adelaide, for all the reasons listed above. Okay, I was only there for a few days but I saw enough to draw that simple conclusion. The weather is nice and hot, about 30 degrees most days, and there's something for everyone. It doesn't have a booming economy and there isn't much work for someone like me there, but I'm sure it's a nice enough place to live.

That's about all I have to say on Adelaide. Oh, one more thing - how's this for a novel idea? There's a bar in Adelaide that let's you play paper-scissor-stone with the bar staff for every drink you buy. If you win, you get it for free, otherwise you pay a slightly over-the-top price for it. How cool is that?

One more thing to report - I've given up on my tank of a camera and have purchased a more modern Nikon Coolpix camera, 7.1 megapixels and a chargeable battery so I won't have to carry round a suitcase of AAs everywhere I go. I got it with a 2Gb SD card for just under 120 quid. Bargain. Hopefully my pictures will be a bit better from now on.

Next update from Perth, home of the great climate. I'm already in Perth of course as I'm backdating but I'll save the gossip for later.