I slept like a stone, and barely got up in time to keep my date with Glenn for further public-transportation adventures in Southern Australia. Over the course of the day I got the details of his sad story, which is very similar to that of other homeless people, except that after his fall into the deep pit of despair he has managed to stay drug free. But I am not going to talk any more about that, and rather concentrate on a slow but fun day.
We figured we could bus our way up to Adelaide Hills. These hills are to east of the city, and is where the wine country of Adelaide is located. It took a while because with the walker (or walking frame as it is called here in Aussieland) we have to move slowly. We were going far, so it took at least 45 minutes, and all along Glenn talked non-stop; I am getting used to only being able to put in a word sideways now and then, but a crabby lady asked him to stop his continuous jabbing and when he didn't she plugged her ears up in desperation.
Our first stop was the German town of Hahndorf. Turns out that around 1820 a group of Lutherans left Germany aboard the sail ship Zebra, to escape the merging of the Lutheran church with the Presbyterian church. After many hardships they arrived in Southern Australia, and in the wooded mountains and intermontane valleys of what is now known as the Adelaide Hills found the perfect conditions to start a new life. The valley is a dreamland, and the old town with a farrier, a general store, the Lutheran church, the school, and many other buildings that have now been turned to boutique stores must have been the perfect model of an Alpine German town.
From there we headed to Mt. Lofty, the highest point in the hills, where you get a fabulous view of the hills, the Adelaide urban area, the port, and the Circum-Antarctic Ocean beyond. Loverly!
Back in town in the afternoon, Glenn had to go to his doctor, and I went by myself to the State Library (beautiful but with an ever decreasing number of patrons), and the Natural Science Museum. Yawn! Yet another museum, with all sorts of stuffed animals on the first floor, but it had a geology floor on the third floor, so I was forced to go look at the rocks they had on display up there (normally misclassified granite and sandstone). The elevator door opened, and the first display was a large slab of sandstone (large, like the size of a king size bed standing on its side), with some of the best ripple mark structures I have ever seen. Nice, but so what? Ahhh, the thin bed of sand whose upper surface were the ripple marks had an underside, which one can see by simply moving around the mattress. The underside was faintly marked by whatever was buried by the thin layer of sand. Dimples, scratches, and ... radial bodies the size of a quarter, and a ribbed blob the size of a pancake, and a baguette-size structure with transverse ridges, and ... OMG, I was looking at the world-famous bed of the Ediacara fauna!
Well, maybe your blood pressure didn't rise at this statement, but let me assure you that any geologist would start drooling at seeing the best fossils of soft-bodied multicellular organisms anywhere in the world! Dated at 600 million years ago, the Ediacara fauna precedes "the Cambrian Explosion of Life", which heralds the diversification of hard-shelled multicellular organisms. There, in front of me, was the ground step of what was to become the beautiful unfolding of life diversity on Earth. A one in a lifetime moment.
The museum also had a fine display of fossil Australian giant mammals and non-flying birds, which flourished between 400,000 and 100,000 years ago, and a three story "long" giant squid.
I met with my mate Glenn at the Greyhound station, and with a warm embrace I wished him best luck getting back on his feet, and boarded the bus that will convey me to Alice Springs.
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