Meeting Truffles, Horatio, Oliver and Augusta

Day 115 – Adelaide, Australia

For my last day in Adelaide, I went to the last museum I wanted to see, the South Australian Museum (please note the profound originality of the title).

Of course, going straight there wouldn’t be fun. Yesterday I rode the bus in a big great loop, today I walked straight to it… stopping to say hi to Truffles, Horatio, Oliver and Augusta.

Left to right: Oliver, Horatio and Truffles. Augusta is outside the picture, on the left.

Since that wasn’t funky enough, while passing in front of the library, I stopped to see the exhibition “One mountain, one river, one sage”.

Exhibit from “One mountain, one river, one sage”.

When two libraries (Shandong, China and Adelaide, Australia) exchange stuff, it will be around books and literature. So there were some stuff about academia in ancient China, book conservation, Confucius (the sage) and its influence on Chinese culture, and so on. It was interesting.

I finally ended up in the museum I wanted to visit. It’s mostly a natural history museum, with stuffed animals, and a lion in a glass case whose tail would occasionally move, to the delight of the parents and the fright of the children (one young boy, already unsure about looking at the lion, who stares right back, fled screaming when the tail moved).

South Australian Museum – Mongoose – For Cécile

There was also a squid, the giant kind, well, this one looked to be in plastic, but real-size. So they put it in a giant box, vertical, in the stairwell over 4 floors. At each floor you discover another part of it. And I finally know how deep is a fathom.

Well, somebody wrote a poem about a kraken, with complicated words like fathom and league (typical 17th century melodramatic poet, thank you Tennyson), so the museum wrote bits of the poem and facts about the sea on the plain walls surrounding the squid.

Less dramatic but more culturally significant, two floors about Aboriginal culture and artefacts. A lot about boomerangs, I should write more about them one day. Like, most boomerangs don’t return to the sender, some boomerangs were made to break on impact, and so on.

South Australian Museum – Boomerang map of Australia

The image heading the article is from the painting Cockatoo Creek.

I visited also the gallery about Pacific cultures (with a few minutes of a movie about shark callers), the opalised fossils -reminded me of Coober Pedy-, the mega fauna, with a small tyrannosaur reproduction, which you could feed $2 to hear roar.

I ended up the day at the hostel, doing laundry and preparing the next few days.

I thought that by renting a camper van, in which I can cook and sleep, that I would be saving lodging money. Que nenni, a camping spot (with showers) is as expensive, even more, as a dorm bed… and of course you are not allowed to park just anywhere. But I will gain in independence and flexibility!