Ok so this morning I checked out Port Augusta as I really hadn't seen anything of it after arriving late last night and finding a place to stay. It looks like a nice relaxed place and they have been doing a lot of work on tidying it up and seemingly trying to reinvent the town. It seems to have a few empty shops and closed businesses about the main street though. The esplanade area turns what would have been a grotty unused area into a great relaxed public space, it is just a shame that you have to find your way through or around a modern ugly shopping centre first before you can even see it, if it was an open view from the main strip to the esplanade it would work a heck of a lot better and really transform the town to a very relaxed bright place.
Just beyond the Woolies at the end of the street there is the esplanade.
I like the touch of razor wire on the fence, says a lot really
Looking across to the water tower.
Old water tower is now a lookout.
Town from the water tower.
Town from the water tower.
Matthew Flinders Red Cliff lookout.
From here it was on to another 310km heading for Adelaide, though I did stop at Snowtown along the way, probably more from morbid curiosity that anything else, just to see the town and how it has developed in the wake of past horrors. It is an interesting little town and looks like a nice old place, though you don't see many people out and about there and the streets are mainly deserted other than for tourists and passing traffic looking for fuel or lunch, it seems a cold and desolate place despite for nice looking buildings. It is an unfair notoriety I guess that has tarnished what would otherwise be just an average country town as none of the murders actually took place there, it is just that the bodies were stored in a local disused bank vault for a while and that is where they were discovered. The town is trying to move on, but it is a bit macabre that you can still get plastic fridge magnets of the "Bodies in the Barrels" and post cards from the local takeaway, not too sure that it really helps the moving on thing. They are now trying to highlight and focus on the "Wind farming" industry nearby the town as a tourist focus. Oh and as a side note, the bank was sold eventually (it has an attached 4 bedroom house) and it is now someones family home, different.
A monument to the wind farming they are focusing on now.
This is actually the butchers shop.
That's "the bank" closest to the camera, the police station is past the pub just three doors down!
Onwards and into Adelaide, which is much larger than I actually expect it to be, I don't know why I always think of it as a small place, but really it isn't that small at all. I am staying at a place in Glenelg so that easiest way to get there was through Port Adelaide, which is a place I have only been through very briefly once before, it really looks like and interesting part of Adelaide and I think I will have to check it out further in the future. Glenelg was it's usual self and there has been some redevelopment of some areas it is basically the same as it has been for years and years. Yes of course lots of apartments have gone in and it is much more high density and Magic Mountain (for those who are old enough to remember) has been replaced with a much less conspicuous building housing much of the same stuff, but basically the place is the same as I remember it, though this time there seemed to be very few people about and apart from chain type food places and Mexican and Tapas bars there didn't really seem to be much in the way of restaurants for dinner.
I caught the tram into the city and the old rattlers have been replaced with new quiet modern ones and the biggest thing I noticed was that it now goes all the way through town to the entertainment centre rather than just ending at South Terrace like it used to, so much easier to get into town, but that also means that it is much more used as a commuter system for the suburbs along its route, thus the trams can get really packed which can be a bother when they only run every twenty minutes. Anyway it was getting dark by this stage but at least the weather had cleared up a bit, so I had a walk about the city centre and there is a lot of reinventing happening here as well. There seems to have been lots of work done cleaning up and redeveloping the public space around Victoria Square and the entire of Rundal Mall is being redeveloped as well into a much "airier" usable space which looks good really. The foodie east end has certainly got lots of eateries and as usual some places are packed and some places have not a single person in them, funny how that happens, there are even close alignments with Melbourne institutions along that section though they have almost insignificant differences to show their unique identities which is quite funny. Over all an interesting city to visit and I know that my visit was very short, but planing to visit there again soon anyway.
Tomorrow it is time to head for home...
