Finding Your Feet in the City of Churches

Tell a Melburnian you're off to Adelaide and you'll get a polite, pitying smile. Ignore it. Sydney has its bridge. Melbourne has that laneway fixation. Adelaide, meanwhile, has a calm you don't need a yoga retreat to reach. People call it the 20 minute city, and what that really buys you is the ability to get where you're going without losing your soul to gridlock.

The Morning Ritual: Central Market
Start at the Adelaide Central Market, trading since 1869. Inside you'll find pungent cheeses, towers of organic sourdough, stallholders who genuinely want to chat, and enough noise that you give up trying to hear your phone. My own routine is a coffee at Lucia's Fine Foods, then leaving with about three kilos of produce I didn't know I needed. The Mushroom Man is worth finding, and yes, that's his actual title. His fungi might be the best in the Southern Hemisphere, though I've never tested the claim south of the equator.

A Walk in the Park (Literally)
Adelaide's centre sits inside a ring of parklands, so a patch of grass is about a five minute walk from wherever you're avoiding emails. The Botanic Garden is the pick of them. Its Bicentennial Conservatory looks like a giant glass spaceship that landed in a rainforest. The Himeji Gardens on South Terrace are smaller and quieter, a pocket of Japanese planting where I sat for twenty minutes and failed to decide whether I could live here.

Culture and Coastal Vibes
The Adelaide Oval is widely considered one of the most beautiful cricket grounds in the world. I find cricket about as exciting as watching paint dry, and the RoofClimb still gave me a view worth the ticket. The stairs up are steep and my calves complained for two days.

As the sun dips, take the tram to Glenelg. Walk the jetty, grab a bag of fish and chips, watch the light go over Gulf St Vincent. If the beach feels crowded, stroll up to Henley Beach instead; the square there has bars and gelato I'd queue for again. I never made it to the second scoop, because the first melted faster than I could eat it in the wind.

The Liquid Gold
You can't discuss Adelaide without wine. The Barossa Valley and McLaren Vale sit practically in the suburbs. With one spare afternoon, go to The Cube at d'Arenberg, which resembles a Rubik's Cube half-solved by a giant. The tasting room downstairs pours a Shiraz I'd happily drive an hour for.

Adelaide doesn't shout like its coastal cousins. It is delicious, a bit odd, and happy to stay that way. Keep it quiet around the Melburnians, since the empty roads are the whole point.