Sunday 29^th March 2015 – Adelaide.

We docked in Port Adelaide, 45 minutes by road away from the city. As it will be BST in the UK we’ll only be nine and a half hours ahead now!

For the first time in a long time we were booked onto a tour today – to the Adelaide Hills and more specifically Hahndorf, which is the oldest surviving German settlement in Australia.

Unfortunately, the port authorities wouldn’t let the ship use two gangways and as 800 people were disembarking it meant that we queued for a good 30-45 minutes to get off the ship… wonderful!

Our guide on the trip was a woman in her sixties called Hannah, who emigrated in 1969, but still had a pronounced Germanic accent. She didn’t seem to know much about the area and just read from a tourist guide. Fortunately our driver – Steve, a former South Australian policeman – rescued the tour and kept interrupting her “spiel” to tell us interesting facts about where we were passing. As it was Sunday, there wasn’t too much traffic around so he drove through the Central Business District (CBD) of Adelaide pointing out interesting buildings and telling us the history of the place. Then it was out onto the freeway for about 25 kilometres to the summit of Mount Lofty (another unimaginative name?) for a photo stop. Here he came with us and pointed out the areas of Adelaide. We could even see the QM2 even though it was nearly 30 kilometres in the distance (photo duly taken with our brilliant camera!)

Hahndorf itself is really quaint and picturesque. We walked round passing pubs like “The German Arms” and cheese shops like “Udder Delights” until we stopped at “The German Cake Shop” for coffee and steak pie (couldn’t find the cakes!). The pies were lovely and Ian even managed to decorate himself with tomato ketchup! (You still can’t trust these Germans!!)

Rather than return via the freeway, Steve took the old road back to Adelaide and stopped off for us to take some pictures of koalas in the wild… aaah!

He then took us along the coast, past all of the beaches, and back to the ship at the end of a brilliant trip… Thanks Steve!

We were due to sail at 6pm but at 5-45pm the Captain announced that a problem with part of the propulsion system (engines?) had been found, during routine maintenance. This would be fixed by about 10pm but the Port Authorities wouldn’t let us leave in the dark - so we won’t be going until 8am tomorrow morning.

Unfortunately there were no coaches available to act as the free shuttles for the 45 minute journey into Adelaide (although we could, as the Captain said, use taxis or the train) - so most people stayed aboard. He confirmed that we would be able to make up the delay during the three sea days between here and Fremantle, so no-one thought anything of it – although there was disappointment that we couldn’t easily get back into Adelaide.

Friends of Dianne and Jenny, however, put a different spin on the whole “delay” thing. They live in Perth and were originally meeting them there, but two weeks ago managed to buy a trip from Adelaide to Fremantle. They were rather surprised at the Captain’s announcement as their travel agent had told them a fortnight ago that it would be ok to join the ship here as it was overnighting in Adelaide for regular maintenance…

It does make it difficult to understand why Cunard don’t always tell the truth…Surely it couldn’t be that they had decided that the cost of keeping the shuttle busses on through the night (as they had done in Auckland) was too prohibitive?

In the evening we went to see our new mate David Copperfield’s full show. His full name is Stanley David Copperfield (don’t you just hate people who use their middle name?) and he told us that when the American one came to England he was asked how much money he wanted to change his name! Well – even though he was born in Scotland, he was brought up in Yorkshire so you can imagine what the answer was…. So, there are still two “David Copperfields”!

The show was good and finished in time for us to have cheese and biscuits before calling it a day.

We’ll be seeing the Captain at tomorrow night’s cocktail party…wonder if any of us will be brave enough to ask him to come clean and tell us the truth??