An overnight stop in Renmark found us on a detour the next day and nipping into the Wolf Blass winery just outside the city. Sadly I was driving so only got a little taste of the wine, but it was very nice and it meant I could save myself for a proper wine tour instead. We arrived in Adelaide early that afternoon, and we were immediately faced with a problem. Where do we park DARPA? After gritting our teeth over a $6 3 hour car park we went off to find the information booth and hopefully some news on free camping near the city. Alas! This was not to be. Apparently cities aren't amenable to scrounging travellers so we drove around the suburbs for a while in the dark trying to find a caravan park we could stay in. There is a happy ending to this story and we ended up in Mitcham, a suburb half an hours bus ride from the city with a booking for 3 nights. 3 whole nights where we didn't have to drive and worry about cooking porridge on a tiny gas stove. Lovely. Another positive was that we managed to book a wine tour for the next day - nothing like last minute planning. I was pretty much tearing my hair out as I do like to be a lot more organised than that but travelling forces some changes upon you. Haha. Regardless of that the next morning found us up bright and breezy and getting dressed up for a tour around the wineries of Barossa Valley. Any excuse to not wear crappy jeans and a fleece to be honest.

Bums on Seats was our tour and Paul, the owner and driver for the day, was a pretty funny guy, full of cheesy dad jokes and stories of his ex-girlfriend who stole all his money and forced him to bankruptcy. There's a lesson in there somewhere kids!

The first hour of this tour contained literally my most coveted experience in Australia - the first viewing of a wild koala. It only took 6 bloomin' months. Jeez. They aren't easy to find! The one we saw was called Blinky and he was awesome. I was immediately in love. Apparently male koalas are territorial so he gets to 'service' all the females in his local radius. Lucky fella. After gawping at him for a solid ten minutes, and saying 'cute' perhaps 30 times I had to get back on the bus and leave my new favourite thing behind. Sad times.

Our first proper stop was Hahndorf, the oldest German settlement in South Australia and the most picturesque and cute towns I've seen in the whole of Australia. Now I've not been to Germany but I imagine they have literally plucked a little village from the country and dumped it in the Adelaide hills. It was pretty touristy as you'd expect, but it had lots of German bakeries and pubs and stuff, and we also got to sample some amazing cheese and chocolate. Not at the same time though, that's just weird. The strains of German music pervaded the air and bratwurst was on every menu, I truly don't think I ever need visit real Germany! A big thing in Hahndorf was also my purchase of a Cadbury's fudge bar, my first since leaving home and a taste revelation compared to the crap they call fudge over here. It was well worth the 90p equivalent it cost!

A slight aside on Hahndorf, any proud South Australian will tell you that Adelaide is the only city not founded by convicts. Oh no no, it was a 'planned colony of free immigrants, promising civil liberties and freedom from religious persecution' and as far as I can tell a lot of Germans and Greeks moved there - as evidenced by a few Germanic names around and a profusion of Greek Orthodox and Lutheran churches all over the state.

Hahndorf over and done with off we went to our first winery, Kabminye wines. Now I'm not going to give a massive run down of every wine and what I thought of each, if you want that then Nina's blog is probably the way to go. I will say that Kabminye had a gorgeous medium sweet white that I had a glass of with our fancy ploughman's lunch, which when we first saw it I thought wouldn't be enough for the 10 of us but evidently the winery know what they are doing as we had leftovers, despite my best attempts to eat as much as physically possible!

From Kabminye we went to Villa Tinto, where, to my extreme horror, they only did red wine. YUK! I despairingly said to Paul, the driver, could we not spend long there as I didn't drink red, so he sent me and another girl down to Rockford Wines where they did do whites, hooray. They also had a chutneys and jam section so I got to taste yet more delicious food, it truly was a day of dreams. Rockford wines use only traditional methods of wine making, which, whilst sounding pretty fancy, doesn't make them taste any different to the usual. That ticked off next we were on our way to Chateau Dorrien, which as well as wine did mead, the traditional honey wine that is apparently the ancestor of all fermented drinks we have now (ie beer). Personally it was a little strong for me and burnt the back of my throat, I think it needed some soda water or something to lighten it, but Nina loved it and termed it 'Christmas in a cup!'. Our last encounter, after much cajoling from Nina, was Penfolds, one of Australia's best wineries by all accounts, and they did do a nice white, whilst Nina got to try one of the fancy reds, a fact she was most happy about and put a big smile on her face for the rest of the day. The bus journey back to the hostel was uneventful, most of it was spent with Nina heckling the driver, which he appeared to find hilarious and offered her a half price tour the next day to McLaren Vale which she gladly accepted. Personally I had had enough of wine tours - I find it all a little pretentious and you don't get enough wine to get drunk so it's a bit upsetting really. I found a couple of lovely wines which I could have bought, but the price was a barrier and getting them home even more so, although I'm sure I could have polished them off by the time I left Australia.

Thus the next day I had to myself and duly took myself off to Becca's Mecca, the state library of South Australia, and spent a happy few hours wandering around and using the internet. I really am very happy in libraries - maybe I should just be a librarian when I get home! I also finally got to see Prometheus which I'd been hankering after for about a month so when I saw that there was discounted tickets on a Monday I thought it would be rude not to. All in all it made for a very happy day and I was back at DARPA to meet Nina after her trip and our last night in Adelaide.

Becca