Visiting places in Adelaide Hills   

TRAVEL

By THOMAS HUKAHU
IN the last feature on Adelaide, I told you about two visits I made to two interesting places, one within the city and the other, a little to the west, to the coast.
In this week’s article, I will share about a visit to parts further out to the eastern side of South Australia, to the hills.
An interesting fact about South Australia is though the state has 1.7 million people, 1.3 million of those live within Adelaide, the capital, and its surrounding suburbs.
The other 400,000 are scattered around the smaller townships and fertile valleys further from the city, where one can find people who work the land.

 Major events on show
This is just my second month in this southern state of Australia, but I realise that there is a lot more to be discovered in this land which was formally under the rule and reign of the Kaurna people, the Aboriginal group who were the first custodians.

I also noticed from certain websites recently that South Australia is also described as “The Festival State” and “The Wine State”, and to my amazement just lately it was said to be “The Space State” also.
At the moment, certain major annual events are going on here. One that ran over last weekend was the Superloop Adelaide 500, which is described as “Australia’s largest domestic motorsport event and widely regarded as one of the best touring car races in the world”.
(To celebrate that car race, the Royal Australia Air Force, or RAAF, assigned one of their F/A 18 Hornet fighter planes to do drills over Adelaide city on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. It is the fastest moving equipment I have seen in my whole life. One moment it is within your view and within three seconds or less, it is disappears moving to far north or south,)
I am particularly interested in Adelaide’s “Writers’ Week” which kicks off this week. (I was told by a university tutor that it is the only writing festival in Australia that is free to the public.)
As stated earlier, in this article I will share about the Adelaide Hills and an old historical town, among other places. (Actually, the trip I was on was organised for the Australia Awards students from different countries who were attending the University of Adelaide for the first time.)

 Bush fires affected rural people more
If you look at a map of Australia, you will see that South Australia borders Northern Territory in the north, and shares a smaller boundary with Queensland to the northeast. To the east, its mainland borders with New South Wales and Victoria, and to the west with Western Australia.
That is, South Australia borders with all other mainland states in Australia and Northern Territory. Of course, it doesn’t share a border with the Australian Capital Territory, which is within New South Wales.
The whole world has heard about the Australian bushfires and I was wondering before I travelled down here, if the fires did destroy parts around the city.

From following the news, I kind of deduced that the fires affected the people living out of the main urban areas. And when I arrived, I noticed that that was correct.
The most affected areas here in South Australia are Kangaroo Island, a tourist destination situated to the south and other rural areas, including the Adelaide Hills, a region to the south-eastern part of the state.

 Stopping by at Gorge Wildlife Park
Our trip to the hills started from the campus where we all gathered and boarded a tour bus at 10 am on Jan 29.
Then we made our journey slowly out of the city towards the northeast.
More than 30 minutes later, we started climbing up towards the Gorge Wildlife Park, which is in Cudlee Creek, up on the hills to the northeast of Adelaide.

When we arrived at the park, the students got to see different animals – some were local species while others were introduced. There were kangaroos, camels, koalas, emus, pheasants, fowls, alligators as well as brown penguins.
A major highlight for many visitors to the park, whether young or old, was to cuddle a koala and have a photo taken. Of course, the creatures cuddled were tamed. (We were warned to stay away from a koala in the wild, it can scratch.)
In an open area within the park, some of the kangaroos felt so comfortable with humans that a visitor could reach out and touch them, or sit beside them and take a selfie (which some of the students did).

Visiting a local chocolate factory
After the Gorge Wildlife Park, we travelled down south through the hilly rural area where the road snaked through patches of beautiful grassy slopes and vineyards. Our next stop was at the Melba’s Chocolate and Confectionary Factory at Woodside.
The set-up boasts of using vintage equipment which are still producing chocolates of different types as well as other confectioneries, local favourites in the state.

The interior of their main building had notices and advertisements placed on walls, those took you back in time, the kind of art designs that you only saw in movies with a setting back in the early 1900s in America or Europe.
Students bought their packets of chocolate at the factory, whichever they preferred. In one section of the room, a staff was handing out free samples of a chocolate to people to taste.
(I asked the staff where they got the cocoa from to make their items, but none of them knew for sure.)

Walking through Hahndorf, an old town
After the visit to the chocolate factory, we moved further south.
By then, we could now see evidence of the bush fires, where acres of forest and farmland were scorched when disaster struck late last year and into the earlier part of this year.
I tried to imagine the losses suffered by the owners of the land, where once green trees stood, today only blackened stumps of those remained. It was a sad sight to behold.
However, we also saw that life continued for most of the farming communities here. The resilient people were still working the land in places that were not razed by the fires.
We continued south until we reached Hahndorf, which is often wrongly called “German Town”.
It is named after a Danish captain who helped in bringing the first lot of German settlers to South Australia in 1838.
We were told that “dorf” in German means “village” and therefore the town’s nickname should be “Hahn’s Village”, not German Town.
There is a lot of interesting history here. The town, 20km southeast of Adelaide, is situated in the Piccadilly Valley in the Adelaide Hills, and had supplied the city with fresh vegetables and fruits for more than a century.
Our bus stopped there and our supervising staff told us that we had more than an hour to discover the place for ourselves. The main street was lined with deciduous trees and some were sporting colours that made the place quite picturesque, yes even when it was not autumn yet.
After visiting one of the oldest churches in town, a Lutheran church, I walked back along the main street and entered the Hahndorf Academy, a building that displays historical art and items used by the first German settlers who worked the land there.
A woman (who I had an interesting conversation with) said often she marvelled at the strength of the women in those early days who walked barefoot from these hills to Adelaide to sell their produce and return with groceries and other necessities for their families.
She said “we are not that strong today”, as compared to people in the past.
Of course, the men would be busy in their fields fixing the plots and planting. It was the role of females to bring the things they farmed to the market in Adelaide, 20km away.
Today, Hahndorf and the surrounding area still produce crops or other items to supply the city – grapes, strawberries and even chocolate.

 Reaching the summit of Mount Lofty
The last stop we made before making our way back into the city was the Mount Lofty summit.
It is the highest point on the hills where one can look back to the Adelaide Plains to the west and see the city and the high-rise buildings, an anomaly among everything that was flat for tens of kilometres of relatively flat land in all directions.
The summit on the mount has a café where people could get food, drinks and coffee and enjoy a day on one of the highest points in Southern Australia.
One can board a bus from the city and stop at the foot of Mount Lofty and stroll up the gentle-sloped road to the summit. Alternatively, people can opt to do bushwalking, by taking a trail through the trees to get to the top.

• Next week: First Australian astronaut gives tips to students