Adelaide: South Australian Museum

When we decided to book the Atura Hotel @ Adelaide Airport, we knew we would need transportation to get into the city today to do a bit of sightseeing. Our research showed that there were two public buses that left from the airport that would work for us … a 5-minute walk from the hotel.

So, after breakfast, we walked over to the bus stop, bought our day passes, hopped on the J2 bus, got off on Greenfell Street in the CBD, and cut through Rundle Mall to get to the South Australian Museum (SAM) … with a short coffee break at Caffe da Marco since we had some time to kill before the museum opened at 10:00a.

Google bills SAM as a natural history museum. It is more than that. Exhibits range from the first signs of early complex life and some of the oldest rocks in the world (3,600 million years old), to a comprehensive collection of Aboriginal culture, to minerals from all over the world and Australian meteorites, to taxidermied animals, to artifacts from Pacific Cultures, to the Australian Polar Collection … heavily focused on Mawson’s expedition, to Ancient Egypt artifacts … including a couple of mummies, and more.

We thoroughly enjoyed the museum … and were especially left in awe of the Addyman Plesiosaur, the finest known opalized fossil anywhere in the world.Read more