Day 58 - 11/29/22 - Adelaide, Australia

 To the relief of many, the motion to the ocean reduced and then stopped overnight as we entered the calm waters leading to the Port of Adelaide.  Since we weren't scheduled to arrive at Adelaide until 2pm, there was a full slate of morning activities.  

We started with Chris' coffee chat which this morning was with himself.  It was interesting and he also entertained questions about the upcoming ports of call.  He's been narrating short port descriptions which are viewable on our stateroom televisions.  Afterwards, Dr. Woodman gave a fairly interesting presentation on cultural do's and dont's.  We caught a quick lunch and then positioned ourselves in the Crow's Nest to watch the sail in.  

The sail in was interesting in that it's a pretty narrow approach with a slight left or port side turn.  The bridge team then sailed the Westerdam to the end of the harbor near some container cranes and pivoted the ship clockwise in the docking area and sailed back towards the exit and berthed behind some type of bulk fuel cargo ship.  The berthing went smooth and quickly we had a gangway set up and were cleared to leave the ship.

Where we are docked at the Outer Harbor, it's a 45 minute train ride into town, but there's a terminal right there.  But 1800 tourists are vying for a spot on trains that run only every 1/2 hour.  The first group of passengers appeared to have made the schedule 2:08 train, and they appeared to have put another train into service as the next bunch filled that train and it left before the scheduled time.  One can purchase a tourist pass for about $11.50AU which is good for all day's transportation or if you have a metro card you can pay by trip.  And because of the overwhelming crowd and only two tick windows at the Outer Harbor, we were able to purchase tickets or refill Metro cards upon arrival at the Railway Station in Adelaide.  I have a Metro Card and it wasn't very expensive to travel to the city.  It was about $3AU each way.

Once we were in the city, we walked east on North Terrace St. past  the library, museum, university, and many monuments.  We entered the Botanical garden and wandered through them for over an hour and a half.  They are very interesting and varied in their flora and fauna.  There was a rain forest building and a tropical Amazon water lilly building.   We saw turtles and many types of birds including lorikeets, crows, magpies, ibis', and ducks of various types.  The garden is well kept with lots of walking paths and little trails to explore.  We really liked it.

We left the garden and decided to walk back to the railway station through the center of town. It was after 5pm and we spotted an Italian pizza place and stopped there for a pizza and a green salad for dinner.  It was very good.

We walked west down Grenfell street before walking a block north to Rundel Street which is a pedestrian mall in the center of the city.  It was decorated in Christmas decor and we enjoyed reading the displays which are a progressive contest where one needs to solve a word puzzle. We made it back to the Railway station and boarded an empty train at the time which left at 8:42pm full.  45 minutes later we were dropped off at the port.  Along the way we enjoyed conversations with fellow cruise passengers about our days.  One popular destination was HAHNDORF which is about a 30 minute bus ride southeast outside Adelaide.  Maybe we'll do that next time.

Back on the ship, we headed immediately to our stateroom as we needed to be fresh for our tour tomorrow which starts at 9am. I'll write more about that tomorrow.