[AUTHOR'S NOTE: Realizing I have neither the time nor the energy to write full posts about my two-week trip to Australia, especially when I have already written fairly extensively in my email photo digests / travelogues, I decided the smartest and most efficient move would be to post the content of those five emails here, backdated. The following was posted late evening on Tuesday, March 10 PST, but was originally sent to my email list midmorning earlier the same day, local time in Seattle, after having traveled 24.5 hours back from Adelaide via Sydney and San Francisco, arriving home last night.]

Wednesday, March 4, 2020

Mary Ann, my maternal uncle’s David’s wife of 40 years, demonstrates with Shobhit at the Adelaide airport—to which we flew from Melbourne—the apparent new “greeting custom” in the age of Coronavirus.

Friday, March 6, 2020

Ever the one to go out of his way to save costs—and also sharing that cooking “relaxes him”—Shobhit cooks a pasta dinner on Friday night at Uncle David and May Ann’s house in Adelaide, after our two days on Kangaroo Island (detailed in my last email). We stopped at a grocery store on the way home to pick up a few vegetables, but mostly Shobhit whipped it up using either leftovers from the picnic lunch brought to Kangaroo Island as well as supplies already on hand at the house, like a packet of spaghetti noodles. In any case, we all had huge bowls of pasta; leftover cheese and crackers that had been taken to Kangaroo Island (with just a bit of beach sand in it); toasted bread; and a few other leftover dips and spreads we had brought from Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne. This massive amount of food was indeed provided at a fraction of the cost it would have been had we all gone out to eat for dinner, and Shobhit got to cook, which made him happy. (I did chop a few of the vegetables, but otherwise spent my time working on uploading my Kangaroo Island photos while Shobhit cooked.)

Saturday, March 7, 2020

The morning after we got back from Kangaroo Island, we had a very long day in Adelaide, starting with an 8:07 a.m. transit train into the center of the city from a station near where Uncle David and Mary Ann live in the southern suburb of Morphett Vale. I took several photos of the view from the train, including when Uncle David pointed out this example of a “brush fence,” used around Australia but apparently particularly in Adelaide, at least historically. I was told they aren’t used even here quite as extensively as they used to be, as apparent pyromaniacs have taken to torching them, which is obviously a very easy thing to do.

First view of our first stop on Saturday morning: the Adelaide Oval, the local cricket stadium. (Other sports are played there as well, including “Australian rules football,” rugby, soccer and tennis. It also hosts concerts, and although its regular sports capacity is 55,317, an Adele concert once packed in 70,000. Just the week before last, Queen was there, performing with Adam Lambert.)

I would normally not have so much interest in a sports stadium of any kind, except that Uncle David had told me they do an “Adelaide Oval RoofClimb,” and I was all over that. Uncle David booked my reservation for me some weeks ago, and booked a ground tour of the stadium for Mary Ann, Shobhit and himself for the same time slot, because none of them were keen on the height or intensity of a roof climb. I sure was, though! Because it was the only opportunity I had for a high-vantage-point view of the city—the closest thing in Adelaide to the Sydney Tower, or the Eureka Tower Skydeck in Melbourne.

The Adelaide Oval RoofClimb, a tour that lasted two hours, was quite the production. The first half hour or so consisted of my 11-member 10 a.m. tour group (five couples, and me) fitting into blue jumpsuits and then harnesses, which were securely fastened to a sort of wheeled weight that then fitted onto a track that ran in a loop around its route along the Oval’s roof. It was exactly the same kind of deal as the Sydney Harbour BridgeClimb would have been, only this was far less expensive—and still $109 AUD (about $73 USD). And even though Adelaide’s skyline is nowhere near as expansive (greater Adelaide’s population is 1.3 million, as opposed to Sydney’s 5.2 million or Melbourne’s 4.8 million), of course I still found it totally worth it to get that view—and, as it happens, Adelaide’s skyline is still pretty significant for a city its size.

Anyway this was one of several stops on the tour where the guide would take photos of us with his camera (itself attached to a secure little cable affixed to his bag), which were available for sale at the end of the tour. We were not allowed to bring anything at all of our own up there, much less phones or cameras; I even left my wedding ring and my wallet in a secure locker down on the ground level. The options at the end included one or two printed photos you could purchase individually, but the only way you could get digital copies was to purchase the $59 (AUD) “USB Ultimate Photo Pack,” which was what I did. So really, the total cost of my “RoofClimb” turned out to be $168 AUD (or $112 USD). Still worth it, at least once!

This shot looks a lot like it’s photoshopped, but it’s totally real. We all took turns getting our photo of the “lean-back” portion of the tour, where with a cable secured between our harness and a railing, we lean back 50 meters (164 feet, or the equivalent of a 14-story building) above the cricket field. I’m not usually afraid of heights but this bit—which we were all assured was not compulsory—still freaked even me out a little. I only leaned back for barely enough time to get a couple quick shots taken, and then very quickly pulled myself forward again.

Shobhit, who often has issues with heights, definitely made the right decision in not going on the RoofClimb tour. He would have been unable to handle most of it, let alone the “lean-back,” the very thought of which would have truly terrified him.

I was near the middle of the group, and given that we were all tethered to a track, there was no changing the order of our line for the duration of the tour. At the “lean-back” portion, the final couple went to get their photo taken, and the young man knelt on one knee and proposed. There was a cricket game going on down on the ground, and all the players saw the proposal and applauded. The guy did have a ring to offer the young woman (who said yes), and I noticed later the ring had been secured at the end of fishing wire. They don’t want anything falling into the stands below (hence our otherwise only being allowed to go up with “just the clothes on our backs”), but especially not an engagement ring!

While Shobhit, Uncle David and Mary Ann were on their ground tour of the stadium, Mary Ann snapped this shot of my tour group high above them with her high resolution digital camera. That’s me right in front of the thick white pole. I know, it’s hard to get over seeing me in a hat! Honestly I only wore it because I preferred that to letting it hang from a secured strap from the back of my neck, which was the only other option.

I sure was glad they had free sunblock, though. Under normal circumstances I would only have needed it for my face and neck, considering those full body jumpsuits. I was set to be spending the entire day largely outside in Adelaide, though, so before the tour started, since I had stupidly forgotten to put on sunblock before leaving the house, I slathered that stuff all over my arms and legs too, and I was all set for the day.

Second stop: Adelaide Botanic Garden, with its very cool looking Bicentennial Conservatory building (opened in 1989 for the Australian Bicentenary), in one of the fairly vast park lands that surround the Adelaide CBD, making it a particularly distinctive city—roughly 1700 acres of parks make it the only city in the world entirely surrounded by open park land—perhaps my favorite thing about the city.

“The Adelaidean,” still under construction but topped out, is now the tallest building in Adelaide as well as all of the state of South Australia (which is 30% bigger than Texas with 5.8% of the population). At 36 floors and 443 feet it’s not an especially impressive building by any particular measure; in fact it’s about the same height as twenty buildings in Seattle constructed or being constructed between five years ago and five years from now. But! Its status as the tallest building in Adelaide still makes it interesting to me.

Next stop: Adelaide Fringe, the second-largest Fringe Festival after the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and certainly the largest one in the Southern Hemisphere (not that that’s all that hard to do). It goes on for about a month, and Uncle David told us via email weeks ago that “You can’t be in Adelaide during Fringe and not go.”

We went to three shows or exhibits, the first of them the free exhibit pictured here, called “Yabarra - Dreaming in Light.” It was a very cool, informative illuminated art exhibit inside a dark space, telling stories of “The Dreaming”—or the Aboriginal myths that tell the stories of the origins of man.

The second show was a favorite of Uncle David’s and Mary Ann’s from last year, which they liked so much they bought tickets for us all to see it this year: the 80-minute choral performance called “Choir of Man.” The stage is set up like it’s a pub, and a “bartender” offers a steady stream of “free beer” (or rather, no extra cost) to audience members as they come in: you walk up to the bar, get your beer (there was just the one kind they served, and I don’t know what kind it was), and take it to your seat. Then the eight male “pub-goers” sing mostly covers, of varying quality, but mostly pretty great. The sound system could have used some work, but a lot of the more uptempo numbers had so much stomping (and, for one song, clacking of beer mugs) that it more than made up for it. Uncle David was particularly partial to their a capella rendition of Sia’s “Chandelier”—and Sia is an international pop star from Australia, remember; I learned she is even more specifically from Adelaide—but he admitted he had never heard her original version. They both seemed to think last year’s show was better, but I think we still all felt that this year’s was also worth going to.

Adelaide is generally not a bustling city at all, and it was immediately apparent that it has a far more laid-back local culture than either Sydney or Melbourne. Remember also, Australia is a land mass nearly the size of the continental United States, yet the country has only five cities with a metropolitan population of over a million people—Adelaide being the smallest of them, at 1.3 million. I read recently that all of Australia’s cities are among the least densely populated major cities in the world, there is just so much space there. So, with a a few exceptions around large CBDs and adjacent suburbs (which is what they are called there even right outside what we would call a “downtown”), you don’t find a lot of thick crowds. In Adelaide, the notable exception to this rule is at their annual Fringe Festival.

Side note: That’s the new “Adelaidean” tower visible again in the background. There is one other building under construction at nearly the same height (433 feet, 40 floors), and both of these are barely taller than Westpac House (432 feet, 31 floors), the building that had been Adelaide’s tallest since 1988, but I never did get to see that one up close.

After seeing our third and final Fringe show of the day, “The Best of Fringe,” which varies each night and highlights five or six different singing, magic and/or comedy acts going on (and was also very fun), we went back over to the River Torrens Footbridge, to get a look at some nighttime views of the city. We had previously walked this bridge in the morning on our way to the Adelaide Oval from the Adelaide Train Station. This was my favorite of my nighttime shots, even though more of the city was visible to the left.

Sunday, March 8, 2020

Uncle David and Mary Ann had varying ideas as to how to spend Sunday, our last full day in Australia, but in the end, the decision was made for them: Mary Ann’s sister Ros had called her up to tell her they had four passes to the Warrawong Wildlife Sanctuary up in the Adelaide Hills. There are three in their group, with Ros’s longtime partner and her grown son she still takes care of, so they had a spare ticket. That left three tickets to take care of for the other four of us, and Shobhit took care of that by covering the three discounted “Concession” (the Australian term for “senior”) tickets, since the passes apparently covered regular price tickets.

And: the place was pretty awesome. Not quite a large as most wildlife sanctuaries I’ve visited in the States, but none of those had these animals. And sure, this wasn’t quite the same as running across these animals out in the wild, but they were still wild animals. And finding this contented koala up in a tree, actually holding an infant difficult to make out in the photo, was much nicer than running across that probably-starving one we came upon on Kangaroo Island.

These things are insanely difficult to spot up in the trees, by the way. We only saw this one because another lady pointed it out to us. I got this fantastic shot through my binoculars.

I asked another person at the wildlife sanctuary to take this group shot of the lot of us: Danny, Ros’s son; Darryl, Ros's partner; Ros, Mary Ann’s sister; Mary Ann; Uncle David; Shobhit; and me. I realized later that I was spending far more time taking pictures than other people did. Maybe Australians just don’t do it as much? Uncle David and Mary Ann both have far better cameras than mine, and neither of them took nearly as many photos as I did. Then again, I've always been particularly slaphappy with my camera.

Also, just as another aside: no matter who I was with, I was the only one with a completely straightforward American accent. Mary Ann is Australian-born and has an accent thick enough that two or three times I had to ask her to repeat herself repeatedly before I could understand a particular word she was using, usually because of something like the “or” sound coming out of her mouth sounding to my ears like “aw.” This was especially difficult when she would tell me place names I was totally unfamiliar with. Uncle David is American by birth but now a naturalized Australian after living there 46 years, which means that even though he still sounds very American to Australians, to my ears his accent is very muddled—he pronounces countless words the way no American would (“ba-NAH-na”), and even a lot of Australians assume he must be Canadian, rather than American. And Shobhit? Well, he has a fairly thick Indian accent, of course, even though he’s been a naturalized American for ten years. So, even though three of us were either American or American-born, I was the only one of us who truly sounded like one.

The young newlywed woman we had met on the ocean safari while on Kangaroo Island, who was from a rural town much deeper inland, who had told me “Your voice is amazing! It’s like watching a movie!”, even thought Mary Ann’s accent was slightly off, perhaps because of her many years living with Uncle David.

We all went into the cafe for lunch and I got this incredibly sweet picture of Mary Ann (left) with her sister, Ros.

There was a sandwich board advertising a “Koala Pat & Chat” at 3:30, so as soon as we were all done eating we went right over to that. These were separate from the ones we had seen up in the trees, about six of them inside a fenced area having been rescued after things like getting hit by a car or parental abandonment or being afflicted with scoliosis. A pretty big group of us all got to go in and pet them, after being told to take care not to touch their ears or face or they might bite.

So, here’s a photo of me contracting chlamydia. Just kidding! We were assured all of these were chlamydia free. (As is the entire population on Kangaroo Island, by the way, something seen as a sort of insurance policy against the massive mainland populations afflicted with—and largely weakened by—it).

Warrawong has probably more kangaroos than any other species, and the ones there are very friendly. You can even hand feed them (though I didn’t). Shobhit actually pet one almost as soon as we arrived, which kind of surprised me. They have hand sanitizer dispensers posted in several spots, thankfully. I took the above photo as a parting shot as we were leaving. I squatted down to get a more direct shot, which kept making it hop right over to me.

Monday, March 9, 2020

On our way as Uncle David and Mary Ann drove us back to the Adelaide Airport, we first went slightly out of our way to the south so I could get a picture of this gorgeous coastline at Port Noarlunga, near where Mary Ann grew up. This is just a short drive from their house in Morphett Vale. Uncle David was also a teacher for many years before retiring, and apparently in his early days he used to bring students down here for learning water safety, which has long been standard part of school curriculum in Australia.

Parting shot of the Adelaide skyline as seen from the surprisingly close airport. That tallest building in the center is the aforementioned formerly-tallest Westpac House; I think the Adelaidean may be that dark one further distant to the left of it.

Bonus!

This is the gift I made for Uncle David and Mary Ann, to illustrate our connection through Seattle and Adelaide. I superimposed screenshots of the Adelaide CBD as well as North Adelaide, all of which is surrounded by Adelaide Park Lands, within the City of Seattle using Google Maps. Many of Adelaide’s yellow arterials aligned with those of Seattle surprisingly well. At the bottom I lined up silhouettes of each city skyline, both of which I had to purchase because they are licensed images. Each skyline includes city icons (not at scale with each other; the Space Needle is actually far from the city's tallest structure): Seattle’s Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum at far left, along with Columbia Center, Space Needle, 2 Union Square, Smith Tower, Rainier Tower and the Seattle Great Wheel, along with a few other lesser-known structures. The Adelaide side includes the Adelaide Oval, peaks with Westpac House, and ends on the far right with what I assume is Adelaide’s City Bridge, and their landmark St. Peter’s Cathedral.

Anyway, I had the image professionally framed, and I’m rather proud of it. It did take up quite a bit of space in my suitcase, though, especially with bubble wrap around it, and I carted it along in my luggage from Seattle to Sydney via San Francisco by air; from Sydney to Melbourne by train and bus; and then from Melbourne to Adelaide again by air. I was a little nervous about all that but I still managed to get it there in one piece. Whew!

[All Adelaide photo albums on Flickr here; all overall Australia 2020 photo albums here.]