Exploring River Torrens

In an earlier post from Adelaide, Australia I mentioned that I walked briefly along a piece of the River Torrens, Adelaide’s River. I said I might explore it more later.

When I finished lunch at the Art Gallery of South Australia, the sky was still cloudy, but the threat of rain had passed and it looked like it might clear. So this afternoon became the above-mentioned later and “might” turned to “did.”

I set out from the gallery to the closest point on the river, a few blocks away.

River Torrens Riverside Walk

In that earlier entry, I said that the River Torrens is not very wide and it is not put to use by boats as far as I could see. In this post, I need to make a couple of amendments to that previous statement. You’ll see them when they come around.

By coincidence, I met up with the River Torrens today at the point I left it on my very brief encounter with the river the other day. So my impression of it didn’t change at all initially.

There are riverside paths on either side of the River Torrens. I wasn’t at a bridge (although there was one close by), so I stayed on my side of the river and walked downstream, away from the small bit I saw the other day. I figured I could find a bridge and walk back on the other side if I wanted to.

For most of my walk today, the River Torrens flows through the large green space that surrounds central Adelaide. So, for the most part, the banks and a ways back from them are quite green. There are also a few plantings of flowers here and there.

I didn’t walk far before I witnessed the River Torrens widen considerably. Indeed, one might call it a large pond or a small lake at that point. But there’s no accounting for what one might say. It’s a wider river there. Not a large pond or small lake. One is a crazy person.

Walking farther, I saw the reason for the widening. There’s what I would call a small dam on the river. That’s what I would call it. But a sign called it the Torrens Weir.

I don’t know. It looked a tad, but just a tad, too tall for what I think of as a weir.

I ventured across the walkway atop the dam, or weir, or damned weir and took some pictures from there.

The riverside path on the other side of the river appeared to dead-end at a small lookout below the weir/dam. So I quickly walked back to the path on the side of the river I was on before.

I decided to move on rapidly because I didn’t want to have to deal with whether it was a dam, a weir, or a damned weir for one moment longer.

Golf Course by the River Torrens

Walking farther, I think I saw why the path on the other side dead-ended. There’s a golf course there. It comes right down to the river.

I didn’t see any fences protecting the golf course from the unwashed masses. Or the masses washed in the river or elsewhere, for that matter. So I suppose, if I wanted to, I could have stayed on the other side, gone off-trail, pushed through to the golf course and walked through it instead.

However, I fear that being whacked solidly by a hard-driven errant golf ball might be a hazard there. Speaking of hazards, I understand that some venomous creatures in Australia can kill you in 15 minutes. I haven’t a clue as to their normal habitats. For all I know, they might like to hang out on the side of the river I walked on, waiting to murder unsuspecting tourists. If so, I miraculously managed to avoid them completely. Maybe that’s because I was expecting it and they only go after unsuspecting tourists. Whatever. Tomorrow is another day. I hope I live through it.

Real Weirs

As I walked farther downstream I passed two or three (I forget which) real weirs. They were considerably shorter than the faux weir dam upstream.

Above the weirs, the river widened a bit again, but not by as much as above the dam/weir. And it narrowed again below the weirs.

At the last of the weirs, the path on my side of the river ended. But it was past the golf course on the other side. I saw that a path had started up again on the other side by that point.

So I walked across the walkway over the weir. On that side of the river, the trail downstream from that point is kind of rough. Its floor is bumpy, raw earth.

But it is a real trail. A sign named it and said it was designed for children and adults to enjoy the environment. Frequent signs along the way described activities children could undertake there.

The path wasn’t long. Beyond it was, not so much a trail, as a narrow path that existed only because some people walked along it and trod it down despite the best efforts and intents of the powers that be.

I followed that beaten path.

It didn’t last long. I had to scramble up a small hill. A road up there ran parallel to the river. Based on the people I saw using it, I think the road is only for cyclists and one pedestrian, me.

Inland and Back to the River Torrens

I followed the road in an upstream direction. It took me inland a bit, past where the golf course abutted the river, and back down to a path by the riverside. So I continued back upstream, well past the point where, on the other side, I first met up with the river.

During my walk, I spotted the couple of cute redheads pictured somewhere near this paragraph. I also saw a couple of black swans and other interesting birds.

Oh, and here’s the other amendment to my statement of the other day. There are some boats on the river.

A tourist boat plied the river giving people scenic views of it and its shores. The boat can’t go far because of the dam/weir at one end (there are no locks) and the narrowness of the river upstream. I saw one such boat go by. It looked full and the people on board were loud. I decided not to go on it.

There were also some pedal boat rentals. Plus, I saw some craft that looked like giant inner tubes with a floor, a table on the floor, and a small grill sitting on the table. The name painted on the sides of them was, “Chillin’ n’ Grillin’.”

Those craft move very slowly on the river. I saw one near the start of my walk. I was walking in a downstream direction. It floated downstream with its passengers. I wasn’t walking quickly, but I passed it and left it in my dust in no time.

Sitting by the River Torrens

Along my walk, I took advantage of benches and had sit-me-downs three times. The first two sits weren’t especially long. Just a brief spell to rest my feet and enjoy the scenery.

The third sit-me-down lasted longer.

I found a bench right beside the riverbank, facing out to the water. I reached it after more than three hours comprised almost entirely of walking. Only the two preceding short bench stops interrupted my perambulation before the third stop.

(*At this point in the narrative, Joel takes a long, deep breath so he’ll be able to make it through the epically long run-on sentence to come.*)

There, beside the peaceful, scenic River Torrens, I paused to contemplate, in no particular order, the great beauty I saw on my walk by the river, the universe, life, death, love, hate, joy, dread, all the other human emotions in between, war and other violence, hunger, strife, benevolence, caring, empathy, art, culinary bliss, the human intelligence, and the ingenuity that sent humans safely to the moon and back and created treatments and occasionally even cures or preventions for some formerly dread diseases, and, most importantly, how godawful tired my legs had become before I finally got some sense and sat down on the damned bench.

After this period of intense introspection and reflection, I realized that I gained not one whit of positive or negative insight into life, the universe, or anything, but my legs revived. Score one for physical health, and zero for metaphysics.

I then found a bridge back to the side of the river my hotel is on and used Google Maps to plot the shortest route back, taking me away from the river.

Unexpected Sight

The route Google Maps gave me directed me past the entrance to the Adelaide Zoo, which I visited the other day.

There is a clump of trees in front of the entrance. As I walked past it, I heard a loud, screeching cacophony coming from up in the trees. I looked up and saw a large swarm of birds across a few trees.

Then I looked closer. “Wait. Why are they hanging upside down?” Looking even more carefully showed that they weren’t birds. They were bats.

Each tree had a large cloud of bats in it. (I had to look up the collective noun for bats. What I found was “cloud,” “colony,” “swarm,” or “flight.” Cloud or swarm works best for what I saw.)

I took a picture of them, but I had to zoom in well beyond the optical zoom of my camera to get a decent shot. So the resolution on the picture is not great.

After taking the picture, I continued walking along my mapped route and there were, in total, at least a dozen trees nearby with swarms of bats in them.

So, that’s something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.

And, on that note, I’ll end this.