Thursday, April 24: We saw the hulk of the clipper ship City of Adelaide, which sits on land supported by a steel framework near the Port of Adelaide. The ship was built 160 years ago, with an iron frame and wood hull, made multiple trips around the world during the mid-19th century, spent some time sunk in the mud of the River Clyde in Scotland, and finally was bought and moved to Australia as a museum.

She'll never sail again — the hull planks have gaps big enough to stick your fingers through and the skeleton is mostly rust — but volunteers are slowly restoring the interior to her Victorian era splendor, when she carried passengers and emigrants from Britain to Australia. See their Web site for more information.

Friday the 25th was a low-impact day. We did laundry and relaxed. Then on Saturday we cleaned up Diane's rented flat for the last time, then locked up and left the keys in the drop box. We moved our baggage over to the the Adelaide airport hotel — comfortable enough, surprisingly quiet, but I'd only recommend it if you need to stay right at the airport, as we did.

We did get a big fancy dinner that evening at a restaurant in downtown Adelaide called "Part Time Lover." You can check out their menu here. Our dinner was amazing: deep-fried broccoli, almost caramelized; little rolls of sliced veal filled with tonnato sauce; scallops; anchovy-and-bacalao toasts; a nice little blackened steak; salad of lettuce hearts; and a strawberry-rhubarb semifreddo for dessert. All accompanied by some nice South Australia wines. Highly recommended.

The next morning, Sunday the 27th, we got up very early and hiked from our hotel to the airport to check in for our flight. Don't worry! This isn't the end of the trip. Adelaide was just the preamble. But Australia, like the USA, is a big country, so if you're visiting different places it makes sense to go by plane unless you want to take it easy and look at the scenery.

We flew to Sydney and changed planes, then headed north to Hamilton Island, one of the Whitsunday Islands off the coast of Queensland. The islands are an ancient volcanic structure, covered with rainforest and sitting smack dab in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef. Hamilton's a resort, with multiple hotels all run by the same owners. There are beaches, a yacht harbor, hiking trails, restaurants, nightlife — and sulfur-crested cockatoos. So many cockatoos.

I won't give a day-by-day account of our stay at Hamilton because a lot of it consisted of hanging out, hanging around, wandering around, eating seafood, and similar vacation stuff.

We did make a couple of snorkeling trips: one to Hook Island, just north of Hamilton, where we paddled around the reef and saw plenty of fish — sometimes swimming right through shoals of little striped fellows which ignored us completely.

Our other snorkel voyage was aboard a sailing catamaran to Haslewood Island. That expedition was a problem for me: my mustache made it impossible to get a good seal for my diving mask, so I kept getting seawater in my nose and eyes. Finally I threw in the towel and just lazed about on the boat until we visited the famous white silica beach on Whitsunday Island itself. Next time I go snorkeling I'll just shave the damned thing off.

We did have some great meals on Hamilton Island. One restaurant, Manta Ray, had a wonderful tasting menu with "corn ribs" (corn on the cob cut into quarters lengthwise then grilled), lamb meatballs, tuna crudo, and churros for dessert, with a very tart white cabernet from New South Wales.

The other top-notch place was Coca Chu, a "Thai-inspired" restaurant where we got crispy pork belly, fish curry, and mu-shu duck. Unlike Thai restaruants I've been to elsewhere, Coca Chu's dishes avoided hot spices. I don't know if that was a gastronomic choice by the chef, or a concession to the tastes of Australian vacationers. (An aside: while my sample size was extremely limited, it did seem to me that Australian restaurants don't go in for very hot-flavored dishes, at least not to the extent American ones do. There was a refreshing absence of  "hot sauce machismo.")

Our last couple of days on Hamilton were a bit damp and chilly, though we did get in some hiking and took the opportunity to do laundry and attend Pub Trivia Night in the hotel bar — where our utter ignorance of 21st Century Australian pop culture was a huge handicap. I did pick up a nice tan while we were on Hamilton, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to do some reef snorkeling.

On May 2 we flew back to Sydney. The flight, like all good flights, was uneventful. We arrived and checked in to our hotel: the Capitol Hotel in Sydney's Chinatown neighborhood. It was . . . okay. The room was small, but clean and comfortable. The decor was very odd.

Our first night in Sydney happened to coincide with a night market going on in Chinatown, so we strolled around the streets near our hotel, picking up random food items from stalls. It was lovely: exotic, cosmopolitan, inexpensive, and delicious.