Adelaide is also famous for its statues. Wherever you go in the city, you'll find everything from statues recalling famous figures from Australian history to the bizarre street art that springs up everywhere. On the pedestrian precinct outside Rundle Mall, litter bins along the street are decorated with full size bronze statues of pigs standing on their hind legs and nosing through the rubbish, other bronze pigs just standing around awaiting their turn. These pigs, I have learned since, all have names - Truffles, Horatio, Oliver and Augusta, should you wish to say Hello on your way through.

Central Market is a large and diverse area of the city in which you can buy virtually anything you fancy to eat from the tons of speciality stalls selling anything from Cheese to Thai food. You can sit down to eat at a restaurant or scamper from stall to stall bargaining with the cheerful local vendors over vegetables you've never even heard of. The Market is surrounded by cafes, restaurants, fish and chip shops, and with Chinatown just around the corner you could easily spend your day browsing here and go straight on for a meal and a night out afterwards without having to go home in between.

Haigh's chocolates, considered one of the oldest and finest chocolatiers in Australia, has a small shop in a corner of Rundle Mall and their main factory five minutes from the city centre. The factory runs tours for those with a chocolate fetish, although it isn't perhaps the easiest place to find if you're expecting a huge production centre with twelve foot high walls and guards on the gates - Eloise and I wandered up and down the street for some time looking for the place, asking passers by where it was and becoming increasingly frustrated with people pointing back the way we had come, before we finally found it in an ordinary looking building at the front of a small trading estate. Inside, guests are offered tea and coffee and then shown around the facilities - as we passed windows onto the factory floor, workers dressed head to toe in protective clothing were emptying liquid chocolate into vats and pressing buttons. It was very modern and I was a little disappointed to not see people huddled around a table carving out intricate chocolate shapes by hand, but at the end of the tour we emerged into a giant shop containing more chocolate than it should be legal to have in one place - and all we could think about was stuffing our faces with samples. Of course, getting Haigh's chocolates outside Australia is nigh on impossible, but isn't that always the way when you find something nice on your travels?

On the way back from the mall on our second day in Adelaide, we were crossing a busy intersection when Eloise suddenly pointed at the road where cars were zipping back and forth and let out a little gasp of shock. Sitting in the middle of the road was a bird. Making no attempt to move or to fly away, it seemed to be routed to the spot in terror as cars whizzed by and turned mere inches away from where it sat. My first reaction was that it was a toy that somebody had discarded, as there was no movement at all, but by the time we reached the other side of the road and could get a better view it was clear that not only was the bird real but that it was alive and terrified. Before I had even thought about what to do, Eloise had demonstrated once more why it is that I fell in love with her - darting out through the traffic without any thought for her own personal safety, she scooped the bird up and returned to the pavement with it nestled safely in her palm, where passers by came over to see what was going on. The bird seemed totally unharmed, but made no attempt to move or to get away, and just sat there in Eloise's hand staring ahead. Not knowing what to do, we took it back to the hostel where the bird got a great deal of attention from everyone at the reception desk who crowded around to see what we had brought in. A quick phone call was made to the local animal rescue organisation, and a cardboard box was found in which the bird was placed in darkness in the storeroom where it could calm down and recuperate. It's only a shame that we had to move on the next day, and although we heard on our return from Kangaroo Island that the bird had been collected and taken away by animal rescue, we never did find out why it was sitting in the middle of a frightening amount of traffic. My best guess would be that it was somebody's pet that had escaped.

It was nice to be able to explore the city of Adelaide properly, as my visit during my tour in 1999 had not been timed very well. On that occasion, I had arrived on a Sunday and it was virtually impossible to even get anything to drink. It seems to be very difficult to find a bar in Australia which opens on Sundays - As of a few years ago the shops all get to open for business from twelve until six, but they still insist on some very old fashioned drinking laws. It seems that the government have come up with a rule that actually makes it so much more expensive to sell alcohol on a Sunday that most places simply couldn't be bothered. It wasn't even supposed to be possible to use the hotel bar on Sunday - it cost me twice as much because of the Sunday Tax and they really didn't want to serve me, but I managed to persuade them by lying on the ground with my legs in the air and pointing at my mouth in an attempt to convince them that I'd had a long journey and was likely to die of dehydration at any moment. All the same, it was very obvious that they just wanted to clean up and go home - I remember the waitress bustling about with cleaning implements all the time I was there, stripping down the tables and stacking the chairs - so I only stayed for as long as I thought I could get away with and spent the rest of the evening at the cinema watching films I'd not known were coming, one of the advantages of being away from home and out of touch with what's going on. The woman at the box office didn't bother to issue me with a ticket of any kind, just waving me through after I'd paid - I could, in fact, have just walked straight through the doors as many other people were doing in order to buy popcorn inside, and nobody would've ever known that I hadn't paid to be there. The only person who questioned me in any way was the janitor who came in to clean the cinema while I was waiting for the film to start. He asked me if I'd paid, I said that I had, he gave me the thumbs-up sign and went about his business. Everybody must be really honest in Australia.

Another place I got to see while in Adelaide with Eloise was the South Australian Art Gallery. Now, I've always been a bit of a fan of art - not that modern rubbish involving sawn in half cows and upended telephone boxes, but proper art painted by people who have at least bought a couple of paintbrushes in their life. Art galleries, as it happens, don't seem to want me to see them in all their glory however - no matter how many times I attempt to visit the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, for example, there will be whole floors closed off for renovation - usually the floors containing all of Van Gogh's best work. You can imagine, therefore, how happy I was to discover that the South Australia Art Gallery in Adelaide was actually open on the day we went there, that there wasn't a single scaffolding pole or "closed for renovation" sign in sight, and that a whole section of the building was devoted to Aboriginal art. And if there's one type of art you absolutely must experience down under, it's Aboriginal art!

Art galleries are generally all laid out in exactly the same way, so finding your way around is usually not a problem - except that the South Australian Gallery was particularly sprawling and divided onto several levels with multiple staircases so that we kept finding ourselves looking at paintings we had already seen half an hour earlier. Each room is generally the size of a small football pitch, with a carefully selected group of paintings lining the walls and leather seats positioned between lonely statues in the middle so that posh people can sit at a suitable distance from the art and stare at it while stroking their chins thoughtfully. Art galleries also have that special art gallery bleach smell, which tells you that somebody comes through to clean the floor at least once every ten minutes just in case a speck of dirt should somehow manage to find its way onto their ten trillion dollar Monet. We found our way quickly to the Aboriginal art section and were in heaven - I don't really know what it is, but there's something about the way they manage to form entire complex wall sized paintings depicting stories from the dreamtime out of coloured dots which never ceases to fascinate and amaze me. Add to this the fact that traditional Aboriginal painting isn't done with paint but with colours created from earth or the natural ochres found in the rocks around where the artist lived, and you really do have something special. Aboriginal artists also don't seem to know where to stop, designing huge paintings depicting epic stories, and at one point we actually came across a painting which was so large that it didn't even fit on one canvas - so the artist had just done it on several and you had to arrange them side by side to see the whole picture. Now, that's dedication.

Dot painting is not the only form of traditional Aboriginal art, of course - but it is certainly the most well known. In fact, dot painting wasn't originally supposed to be seen by outsiders at all - far from being a whole new painting style, the idea of telling their dreamtime stories as a random collection of coloured dots was actually an attempt to conceal their sacred beliefs from outsiders while allowing those in the know to comprehend them. It was a sort of code - only traditional native Australians would be able to see the rainbow serpent, for example, in the dots - everyone else would see a strange collection of coloured specks and not know what they were looking at. In fact, the elders were not at all happy that their sacred stories had been let out into the world for public consumption. These days, dot art is probably one of their greatest forms of income.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.