Adelaide and Lorne

We flew from Singapore to Adelaide (with a plane change in Perth) on a Thursday, so that Chuck could meet with faculty members from the University of South Australia as well as with a couple of his colleagues from the Office of Naval Research who flew in from Washington. On Friday, while they were all making plans for future collaborations, Kathi took a self-guided walking tour of Adelaide. Until recently, Adelaide was Australia's fourth city -- after Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane -- but with the recent rapid growth of Perth on the west coast it has slid to fifth. While it is growing a bit slower than these other cities, it has retained a lot more of its "old Australia" flavor, making it actually quite pleasant to visit. (When Chuck accidentally deleted all our Singapore pictures from the new camera, the Adelaide pictures were also lost -- so all the pictures here are from Lorne and along the Great Ocean Road.)

It is a planned city, laid out (by a military engineer) on a grid system with large squares and a wide green belt surrounding the city center. There is still a very large, bustling central market reminiscent of a number of major European cities we've visited, such as Budapest. The expected large, modern high-rise buildings are present, but nestled among them are many of the kinds of buildings that were the height of municipal pride a hundred years ago.

We had dinner Friday night with our University hosts in a beautiful waterfront restaurant that specializes in food based on aborigine food traditions. The menu, of course, included kangaroo and emu; all was delicious. On Saturday we took a bus tour of the Barossa valley, a major Australian wine-growing region just outside Adelaide. There were two winery tasting stops as well as many sightings of Australian wildlife in their natural habitat. The tour brought home very strongly the fact that Australia is in the midst of a several-year-long drought and wine yields as well as many other agricultural enterprises are being adversely affected.

We made a mid-afternoon stop at the rural town of Hahndorf, which was founded by German Lutheran immigrants fleeing religious persecution in Europe -- a bit of rural German tradition in the Australian hinterland.

From Adelaide we flew on to Melbourne and, in a rented car, drove the 80 or so miles to the small coastal town of Lorne, where the workshop Chuck was attending (Waves in Shallow Environments -- lots of good math!) was being held in the Grand Pacific Hotel. The hotel's name is grander than the Victorian era building that houses it -- it claims to have been renovated, but Chuck's guess was that the renovation was probably done in the 1930s. One phone in the whole hotel. But the workshop organizers intentionally planned to meet in the isolated site to minimize distractions and to keep all involved in the work being done. (There were two Koalas feeding in a tree adjacent to the hotel.)

Lorne is a small town of about 1200 permanent residents located on the southern coast of the country along the Great Ocean Road, billed as one of the great coastal vistas in the world, on a par with California's Big Sur coast. Having lived at the north end of the Big Sur coast for 15 years, we'd agree that the Australian version is equally beautiful.

The last night of the workshop was marked with a dinner at a nearby golf course that is famous for the enormous number of kangaroos that inhabit its greens and fairways in the evening -- in fact it would seem that so many of them are involved in munching the grass that the golf course may be able to get by with far fewer lawnmowers than other courses. Unfortunately, the "'Roos" are most plentiful at night and it was very difficult to capture them outdoors at night.

The next day we drove back to the Melbourne airport and embarked for the very long flight to London, with a two hour layover in Singapore.

Additional Australia pictures are at: http://chuck.smugmug.com/gallery/2772173#147566314