Adelaide

Before reaching Adelaide I did some exploring of the Fleurieu peninsula, which lies south of Adelaide. In my quest to find some surfable waves, I ended up in Goolwa, and in Middleton. The problem on this peninsula was finding places to spend the night. As my trusty car supplies me with a matras in the back, I'm not keen to find paid accomodation. As every decent backpacker I have a copy of Camps 3 which lists all the free campsites in Oz but unfortunately my options of finding free campplaces on the peninsula seemed very limited. There was exactly one free campground in the vicinity, and it was near Normanville, if I remember correctly. After my surfsession at Middleton beach, I headed over to the campsite in question and found out that it wasn't free anymore. They had put up signs 'no camping allowed' which also had some handwritten 'no whites allowed' notices. Hmmm. I decided to cook my meal and of course was soon irritated by the countless flies that wanted a piece of me and my meal. I called my friends, Mar (canadian) & Takao (japanese) to see where they were spending the night after informing them that the supposedly free site was no longer free.

They were thinking of staying near the Myponga water reservoir in the vicinity which had a parking place. Upon my arrival there, you could also see the 'No camping' signs. What to do, what to do....

We decided to not risk it and head for Myponga itself, were we would try our luck. It was dark now, and we stopped in the middle of the town. We stopped at a parking lot near the town hall. It was a large building and it had some space behind it were we could fit our cars. But there was some light turned on in the building leading us to believe there were people in the building. Some nearby villagers were holding a BBQ that was about to end and we again consulted our maps to see where we could go. Some of the neighbours who attended the BBQ walked back to their homes and gave us a good look. I gave them a friendly "Goodnight" and they approached us. In small australian neighbourhoods you always see signs of "Neighbourhood watch" where to local police seek participation of neighbourhood to prevent crime...

I could immediately tell that the guys that approached us were part of this group of people. They asked us what we were doing and we told them we were looking for a place to sleep. "Oh, no worries, park your car behind the building. There is nobody there, they left the light on." We were relieved, we found a place to stay. "We were a bit worried about you guys, because we had some problems with grafitti sprayers the other day". We assured them we weren't going to spray grafiti.

The next day, I went surfing again. Mar & Takao were heading towards Adelaide and were going to stay at one of the paying camp sites, near the beach (20 mins from city). I wasn't sure if I would join them that day, I would see after the surf session. I surfed at Middleton, and afterwards drove to Goolwa to find a place to sleep, but I eventually gave up. I decided to drive to Adelaide, and it was getting dark when I got there. It was too late to go for a hostel, so I needed a place to put my car and just sleep in it. I decided to check out some of the suburbs for lonely parking lots, but couldn't really find one that I liked. By now it was really dark. I took this road which I didn't know where it would lead me to, and soon I left the suburban areas and headed for what seemed like a mountain. It was a very twisty road, ideal for motorcycles, but not one you like when your looking for a place to pull over and sleep. Eventually, I reached a car pool parking lot, and decided to give it a go. It was one of those sleepless nights that seem to last forever. As soon as the morning light arrived, I got up and tried to find out where I was. Turned out I was near Mt. Lofty. It has nice views looking upon the city so, that was my first destination for the day. Afterwards, I headed downtown, which was deserted as it was a sunday, and it was roughly 8 o'clock.

I checked in at the YHA hostel and explored the city.  It was extremely hot in Adelaide, 40+ degrees celcius.

The next day it was Takao's birthday and we went to Glenelg beach during the day, and had some great Chinese diner in Chinatown. This was nothing like the chinese food that I was used to eat, which is very bland and standard.

When I checked my email in the hostel, I got a message from somebody on Couchsurfing.com who lived about 45 mins from the city. He asked me I wanted to surf his couch and maybe surf one of the nearby beaches. I didn't say no, and the next 3 days, I stayed with him. We went to Middleton beach two times, unfortunately on one of those days we decided not to surf, as the waves were terrible, but we had a good second day.

After this I drove to the Flinders ranges, a mountainrange in the north of South Australia. I went to look at Wilpena pound, a meteorite crater which was really cool and worth the visit. Of course, photos of all this can be found at my flickr site.