Our first walk

A while ago we bought a book with 'Adelaide's best bush, coast & city walks'. We were planning on doing one of the walks this weekend, and it happened to be today. The weather was gorgeous, and I selected a walk for the 'beginning Australian walker', as we've classified ourselves. So on our first walk we didn't want to go too deep into the forest or walk through high grass (snakes!) or do anything too daring. Also because we don't have our hiking boots here yet. We just wanted a semi-urban safe walk. So the 'Stirling Parks' walk sounded just what we needed. A 2hr walk nicely through the park-like surroundings of Stirling.

Stirling is the hilly version of the Dutch Veluwe, very leafy, very green. We drove to Stirling, which is a 15k drive or so, and then parked our car somewhere in a street, which supposedly was the start of our walk. Just what we wanted, nicely between the houses, tucked away in the bush. After 100m our book said to cross the road and take a walking trail somewhere through a park, and walk towards a swampy area, and then through a closely mowed area onto a service track. Etcetera etcetera.

We got lost at step 1 of 10 steps of the description of the walk. And the parks aren't parks as we thought parks would be, parks are to be interpreted as 'reserves'. And that means walking through high grass, sometimes up till your armpits through the boysenberries, eeeks! We were fairly scared to encounter snakes to be honest, with our short trousers (don't have long hiking trousers, so our next mission is to go to Kathmandu and get some! - and we thought we would be walking through 'parks'), no one else to be seen, and some of the trails looked like they hadn't been used for a while. And we weren't even in the middle of nowhere, really between gardens and houses on large blocks of bushland.

Our book says this about snakes:
Venomous snakes are widespread in and around Adelaide's suburbs and the Mount Lofty Ranges. It is possible you could encounter a snake on most of the routes in this book. Keep an eye on the track ahead and if walking through grass make plenty of noise - if they hear you coming they'll get out of the way.

So it wasn't this easy-peasy walk I had planned, but it was actually a very nice walk once we'd left the really high and wild grass behind us. We saw some great birds along the way and walked around a lake that had been excavated in 1922 to provide a reliable source of water for the long gone steam-locomotives.
At the end of our walk we went to Hahndorf for some authentic German food, sausages and kartoffel salat, yummm.

Here a selection of the birds we saw on our walk:

An Ibis

Blue Wren

Red Capped Robin

Yellow Tailed Black Cockatoo - magnificent bird!

Kookaburra