9 & 10 February 2025

We had a lovely time in Adelaide! It feels much smaller than its true population of 1.4 million. Sunday morning included a delicious breakfast at Biga Cafe and a trip to the Gorge Wildlife Centre, recommended by Sam & Vicky. We saw emus, capybaras, wallabies, kangaroos, dingos, cassowaries, and some other interesting birds.

Watchful gaze from an owl:

We also had an encounter with the quokkas, which were adorable. They use their tiny paws to hold your hand still. They eat a variety of veggies includes peas, but their all-time favorite food is almonds. One of the quokkas had a baby that was too shy to eat with us as it had just come out of its mother’s pouch in the last month.

After the encounter, we stayed to pet the koalas before leaving. They were soft and cute but you definitely wouldn’t want to get swiped by their claws. We got a taxi to the beach, ate lunch in the shade at the beach club, took a dip in the ocean, and relaxed for a while and then took the tram back to the hotel.

We had dinner at Shobosho, a Japanese restaurant specializing in yakitori and other grilled food. It way excellent – we loved everything, particularly the pork & cabbage potsticker dumplings and the tuna & edamame dish. 

One of Shobosho’s logos:

On Monday, we did a tour of one of Adelaide’s wine areas, Barossa Valley, which is known for shiraz. We stopped at four wineries, and our favorite were the first and last ones: Chateau Yaldara and Ubertas Wines. Our tour guide told us about the history of the wine industry in Adelaide, and a little general history as well.

German Lutheran settlers, fleeing persecution in Prussia, arrived in Adelaide in the mid-1800s. They established the Barossa Valley as a wine region and did very well through the early 1900s. However, many of the family patriarchs were interned in the Torrens Island internment camp during World War I and the Loveday internment camp during World War II. We didn’t get much information on how long it took the families and businesses to recover, but it seems like there was another dip in popularity in the 1980s due to changing wine preferences, before the valley reached its current popularity. 

The first winery we went to – they get their grapes from a vineyard in the Adelaide hills:

After a short rest, we ate dinner at Africola, a South Australian BBQ restaurant with some African-inspired dishes. We had peri-peri chicken, grilled peaches with stracciatella, and broccolini with toasted pepitas.

The back of their fun, quirky menu:

We spent the rest of our final evening in Adelaide walking through some of the gardens and seeing hundreds of bats wake up and take flight. Today we arrived in Melbourne but we’ll talk more about that later!