Adelaide

After arriving I am not surprised it was difficult to find a hotel a few months ago. They call it March Madness. In this month three big events coincide. the Adelaide Festival, a big period of art, theater, dance, the Fringe Festival, hundreds of quirkier events, and, auto racing [
The Shannons Adelaide Rally features four days of competition and three days of touring within the Adelaide Hills, McLaren Vale, Fleurieu and Murray Mallee regions.
The event includes Prima Tour, Touring, Spirit, Regularity, Challenge and Competition sections to suit drivers and vehicles of all levels.
Happily we have an excellent room in the Pullman Hotel, overlooking Hindmarsh Square.
We left Barossa in the morning and failed to reach Mt. Lofty, our original goal. It turned out that trip would take many hours of hard driving on twisty mountain roads. So we drove on to Adelaide and checked in. I rested while Emma scouted the pedestrian streets near the hotel.
Emma points out that almost all the restaurants here, regardless of level, use ceramic dishes rather than standard industrial plates. And this adds greatly to the pleasure of dining.

Dinner, reserved months in advance,  was at Orana, a restaurant concentrating on introducing Aboriginal ingredients into fine dining. This fascinating and delicious meal is shown backwards below:

Set buffalo milk, strawberry and eucalyptus

Jillungin tea with paperbark wafers - Mango, macadamia and coconut

Fire-pit Flathead (fish), smoked potato, leek & eucalyptus

Marron, native honey, macadamia and green ants

The Saturday night crowd on the street outside.

Wallaby, smoked wattleroo miso, avocado and emu bush.(Behind - bread and macadamia butter)

Australian jerked kangaroo tendon

Sea urchin & fermented lamb resting on unshelled bunya nuts (the restaurant gave me a few to take home).

Riberry, muntrie and bunya nut

I opened the bunya nut with my Swiss Army knife

Spencer Gulf prawn and Davidson plum powder

Kohlrabi (the little cones) dorrigo, quandong (red) and myrtle

Crocodile tail consomme with Australian botanicals

Short rib, pepper & potato pie

Kris Lloyd's foragers feast agnolotti

Oyster, native juniper & nitre berries

Port Lincoln squid, dry aged beef, finger lime & beach succulents

Potato damper and roast lamb butter ( cooked by us over hot coals, turning with myrtle branches.)

 On our second day in Adelaide we walked our asses off along the nearby Torrens River then across town to a craft market then back to the hotel by 12 to rest a while before going to a violin and guitar concert at 2PM (part of the Fringe festival which is inundating the city). Then, an ordinary lunch/dinner of mussels at a Belgian restaurant and back to the hotel to rest for a 9PM comedy performance later tonight entitled "Kosher Bacon."

Torrens River with Pelican Warning Sign

Mussels for lunch/dinner

Fringe Festival Posters

Air show over Adelaide connected to auto festival.

Lucky shot

I also cut open the finger lime we got in Melbourne.

The Saturday night crowd on Rundle Street

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