4 Gardens & a Wander (Adelaide)

Today was my last day in Adelaide. In fact, I posted this from the next stop on my Australian journey, Hobart, the capital of the Australian island state of Tasmania.

It feels funny calling Tasmania an island state of Australia. If you look at a map, the “mainland” of Australia is an island. True, it’s a big island. A very big island. And when you plan a trip here and research travel times you quickly realize it’s even far more vast than it looks on the map. But it’s an island nonetheless.

Tasmania is a much smaller, but still large island to the south of the Australian island mainland. If you hop in a boat and sail south from Hobart the next major plot of land you’ll crash into is Antarctica. OK. Maybe, if you’re careful you’d dock, not crash. However, I don’t have experience with boats. So what do I know about crashing versus docking? Nothing. That’s what. But, you have fun. Dress warmly.

All that claptrap having been said, Hobart is for a future post.

I didn’t have to leave for the Adelaide airport until close to 3:30 in the afternoon. So I had some time in Adelaide today. And of course, my luck being what it is, when I got to the airport I found that my flight was a half-hour late, despite saying it was on time when I left for the airport. As a result, I didn’t arrive at my hotel in Hobart until almost 9:30 in the evening. Consequently, the rest of this entry, the only one I’ll post today, is wholly about Adelaide.

I spent my remaining time in Adelaide visiting four, yes, count ‘em, four gardens. All of them sit in just the southern section of the greenbelt that surrounds central Adelaide, so I also did a bit of wandering through that part of the greenbelt. And, on the way back to my hotel I walked a short distance through the western side of the greenbelt.

With that introduction out of the way, allons-y. (I stayed at a Sofitel in Adelaide. It’s a French-based hotel chain and they play that up here. The staff greets you with bonjour if you present yourself at the front desk, restaurant, or bar during the day or bonsoir in the evening. So, allons-y, let’s go.)

Adelaide Himeji Garden

The first garden I visited was the Adelaide Himeji Garden. It’s a small, lovely, peaceful Japanese-style garden. Adelaide’s sister city, Himeji, Japan gave the garden to Adelaide as a gift. This raises the questions of how does one wrap a garden when giving it as a gift and what is the etiquette around regifting gardens?

Then again, I don’t imagine Adelaide would want to regift Himeji Garden. It’s quite charming. But that still leaves the wrapping question.

Himeji Garden has considerable meticulously shaped topiary. When I say “meticulously shaped,” I’m not suggesting the vegetation is carved into representations of recognizable objects like, for example, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, or an astrolabe. They are just pretty shapes that wouldn’t form naturally and wouldn’t retain their precise shape without regular trimming.

The park also has a small, peaceful pond with rocks and a couple of tiny waterfalls. Some turtles swim around the pond. One of the turtles cleverly camouflaged itself with some small twigs adhering to his back. I think he was a spy keeping an eye on his fellow turtles, ready to report them to the authorities if he saw any hints of subversion in the bale. (I searched the web and the general consensus among the possibly know-nothing sites I found is that the most common collective noun for turtles is “bale,” but, “pod,” “turn,” and “nest” also work. I couldn’t find that as one of the definitions of “bale” in the dictionary, so use it with caution.)

The Himeji Garden also includes a zen rock garden where they grow rocks among carefully raked rows of pebbles. The pebble rows are mostly straight, parallel lines. But where rocks sprout out of the ground, the pebbles are raked into almost perfect concentric circles around them.

There’s a bench shaded under a canopy off to one side and facing the zen garden. I sat on a bench and meditated on why I am supposed to find zen gardens meditative. An answer didn’t emerge in my mind or anywhere else in the immediate vicinity that I could see. But I found myself somehow an iota calmer after the experience, which is possibly the point.

Veale Gardens

Veale Gardens is a lovely park with grass, trees, flowers, a statue, a stream, and a small rocky grotto with a little waterfall-like fountain. It’s a bit of a walk from the Himeji Garden. And when I say “a bit of,” that wasn’t sarcasm. It’s not terribly far. And it was worth the visit.

However, because the garden sits in the middle of the large greenbelt surrounding central Adelaide, I’m not at all certain where the garden ends and the rest of the green space begins.

When I first saw the name “Veale Gardens” on Google Maps (that’s how I decided to go; I didn’t see it in my guidebooks or walking tour app), I didn’t notice the “e” on the end of “Veale.” I assumed there’d be a nice Italian restaurant there where I could get a veal sandwich for lunch. There isn’t and I couldn’t.

(That was a joke. I didn’t honestly think that. But I was starting to get hungry by the time I got to Veale Gardens.)

Rose Garden Lawns East

The Rose Garden Lawns East is close to Veale Gardens. It’s a bounteous rose garden sunk a few steps down from the surrounding lawns. The garden has a wide variety of roses that are quite beautiful and were bursting with colour when I was there. (This is the start of summer in the southern hemisphere. I don’t think it gets very cold here, but I don’t know how long the roses bloom.)

Among the rows of rose bushes, there’s a small rectangular pond with a statue in it. The water in the pond appears to be covered with absolutely brilliantly green pond scum.

By the time I finished inspecting the roses and taking the pictures, including those in the collage near this paragraph, I was getting very hungry, so it was time for lunch.

Lunch

I didn’t see any restaurants on Google Maps near where I was in the greenbelt. And most of the restaurants nearby closed on Sunday. Today is Sunday. But I found an open cafe outside of the greenbelt, about an eight-minute walk away.

It was a nice, little, casual bistro. I ordered a Chilli Egg dish, that included scrambled eggs, and a variety of vegetables, topped with a spicy sauce, all piled up high on a toasted flatbread of some sort. When I ordered it, the person at the cash told me, “Excellent choice.” (it’s the sort of place where you order at the cash, pay for it, and then they serve it to you at your table.”)

Why do restaurant people always say that? What are the chances that every time I walk into a restaurant I’ve never been to before I’m going to manage to pick something on the menu that’s excellent? Come on, every restaurant must have some so-so items. And maybe some that are less than so-so. I’m bound to pick one of those at least a few times due to unfamiliarity with their menu items.

Just once, I want to hear a restaurant employee tell me, “What in the living hell would ever possess you to order that? It’s total crap. Seriously. You could have selected a better dish off the ground of a putrid animal barn. Of course, you’re free to have it if you wish, but I hope you have good life and health insurance policies if you do. You really should consider ordering something else unless you’re a supreme masochist.” But that never happens.

Adelaide Qingdao Rose Gardens

After lunch, I went back into the greenbelt and visited another rose garden, the Adelaide Qingdao Rose Gardens. It didn’t look like it on Google Maps, but it’s almost right beside the Rose Garden Lawns East. The distance that separates the two is short enough that they might officially be two parts of the same rose garden. I don’t know.

I’ll consider them to be separate for these purposes.

Qingdao Rose Gardens is the much smaller of the two rose gardens. It comprises some plots of roses and lawns around three sides of a statue of a woman with her arms up-stretched. One of her arms is holding a weird sort of small harp or similar musical instrument. I’m not sure what it is other than it looks stringed.

A plaque by the statue says the rose garden celebrates the relationship between Adelaide, Australia and Qingdao, China. The statue is called the “Song of the Wind.” The garden, including, I believe, the statue, was a gift from the Qingdao Municipal People’s Government. Another park gift. Never mind how did they wrap them? What did they do with all of that wrapping paper after they opened the gifts? I hope they recycled.

Wandering

Walking between the above gardens took me a long way through the southern part of the greenbelt surrounding central Adelaide.

I also tried to walk up a part of the western part. But the southern end of the western side of the greenbelt is, at least beside its eastern boundary road, a cemetery. A low wall blocked me from cutting through the cemetery. But once I walked past the cemetery, I cut back into the green space and walked up that for a piece, almost until I got to the street my hotel was on.

I say “almost to” because, just before I got to my street, I encountered Adelaide High School, which is built on the greenbelt. It doesn’t occupy the full width of the green space, but time was short so I couldn’t detour around it. I used the sidewalk for the rest of the way to my street.

The cemetery and high school notwithstanding, the people of Adelaide (Adelaidans? Adelaidians? Adelaiders? Aussies of the Adelaide Persuasion? Something else?) are incredibly lucky to have this green space. Of course, luck probably had nothing to do with it. Someone planned it that way back in the day. Subsequent generations respected or maybe even cherished it and protected it. Today it’s an incredible asset for Adelaide. In addition to the gardens I mentioned today, the Adelaide Botanic Garden and Adelaide Zoo I mentioned a few days ago, and the Torrens River I talked about yesterday, I also saw playgrounds, sports fields, a cycling daredevil course, more unnamed flower gardens, and lots more grass, trees, and paths in the portions of the greenbelt I walked through. I wonder if the people of Adelaide know how much of a treasure this is for their city this is.

(I’ve been saying “central Adelaide.” There is a “Northern Adelaide.” It shares the northern part of central Adelaide’s greenbelt and with more greenbelt surrounding Northern Adelaide as well. The thing is, I don’t know if Northern Adelaide is legally a separate municipality and I shouldn’t be saying “central Adelaide,” but rather just “Adelaide” because Adelaide is just the part within its greenbelt, with Northern Adelaide being something different. As I said, I don’t know.

My guidebooks and walking tour app don’t list anything in Northern Adelaide. So I didn’t venture there. I think it’s mainly residential with the associated retail and services, but I’m not sure.)

Adelaide Summary

After Brisbane, Adelaide is a much calmer city. There isn’t as much for tourists to see and do, but it’s pleasant enough.

Adelaide is a very flat city. My Fitbit was probably very happy with the steps I took here, but not the stair-equivalents I climbed. I’m not sure I experience any elevation change whatsoever while walking around the streets.

One complaint I have is that the city is too geared to cars. There are a lot of broad streets, with two, three or four car lanes in each direction, sometimes with additional turning lanes and lay-bys for drop-offs. A few also have small medians down the centre. That makes for a lot of geography for pedestrians to cover to cross the street.

At many (all?) of the signalized intersections, pedestrians don’t seem to get a signal unless they press the light beg-button at the intersection. Those buttons are usually conveniently placed and obvious, but not always.

However, Adelaide does have a wide, pedestrianized shopping street, with trees planted along it and a sculpture or two. And some of the side streets are partially pedestrianized, leaving vehicle access for driveways, but also giving them over to pedestrians and restaurant tables. So, that’s nice.

All of that having been said, I liked Adelaide. I probably spent the right amount of time here, though. I’ve seen all but one of the “must sees” listed in my various sources. I might have been able to take a couple more day trips. For example, the coast is apparently just a 20-minute tram ride away. But the descriptions of it I read didn’t sound exciting. And I’ll be seeing coasts in the other cities I’ll visit on this trip.

The one attraction that all of my sources listed as a “must see” that I didn’t see is the Adelaide Oval. It’s a large cricket stadium. Not only did my guidebooks and walking tour app highly recommend it, but the driver/guide on the Barossa Valley wine-tasting tour I was on the other day said we really should go. He also said that because it’s built in the Adelaide green space it’s part of the City of Adelaide parks and it’s free to go in and look around whenever there are no events on.

I’m not a fan of any sports. And I’ve never tried to figure out cricket. I saw pictures of the inside and outside of the Adelaide Oval. To me, it looked like a giant, modern sports stadium, nice but not spectacular. It’s not the Colosseum in Rome.

There is a “Roof Walk” at the Adelaide Oval. For a fee (I don’t know what it is, but it’s probably expensive), people can climb up to the roof, don protective gear, and walk tethered on an otherwise unprotected catwalk. I might have done that, but the Adelaide Oval didn’t have a large enough team of wild horses to drag me there as I fought against it.

As regular readers know, I like climbing up towers in ancient churches, castles, and such. But the tops of those towers usually have sturdy stone walls low enough to see over, but high enough that my acrophobia doesn’t kick in.

But, walk along a catwalk on the roof of a tall building, even with protective gear on? Nope. Nope. Nope. Absent that large team of wild horses intent on dragging me there against my will, nope.

ASIDE

Long walk, toilet

Mom has been gone for more than a decade now, but she would have appreciated the sort of sign pictured here that I saw in the Adelaide greenbelt. In my head, I can hear her saying, “It’s a long walk. Go to the toilet. Always go before you leave.”

Thanks for that, Adelaide, Australia.