As you’ve probably noticed, we enjoy taking pictures when we travel.
(You: “Nooo…!!!”) Haha…
We’re not professional photographers by any means. We take all of our pictures on our iPhones. We no longer bring separate cameras or video cameras on our trips. But we have a few tips and tricks we use to improve some of our photos. We’ll share them with you in this post. We hope you find them useful.
The last destination on our Fall 2025 SE Asia-Australia trip was Adelaide, the capital of South Australia. Adelaide was a nice city with some interesting things to see and do, but we weren’t as enamored of it as we were with Perth. Perth was a tough act to follow! We stayed five nights and four days – about the right length of time.
We enjoyed the Adelaide Zoo and the Adelaide Botanic Garden, which we covered in this post. The highlight of the city, for us, was the Art Gallery of South Australia, which we covered in this post.
Here, we’ll share a little bit of the story of Adelaide’s founding and some pictures of the downtown area where we stayed and the surrounding countryside, which we visited on a wine tour.
If you’ve seen many (or even some) of our posts from the cities we’ve visited in 2025, our first year of extended travel, you have probably noticed that we visit museums in most places we go. Some have been devoted to history, archeology, oceanography, musical instruments, or even chocolate, but the majority are art museums.
After three one-month trips (two to Europe and one to Southeast Asia and Australia), we’ve lost count of the museums we’ve visited. At times, we have felt maxed out on art museums – especially those that specialize in the “classic” European art of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. After a while, they all look the same.
We’ve seen some outstanding art museums and others that were a waste of time. Most have sufficient merit that, at the end of our visit, we felt our time was well spent. Occasionally, a museum stands out as a particularly exceptional experience.
Such was certainly the case at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) in Adelaide. We spent most of the afternoon absorbed in its exhibits. We had planned to visit the history museum next door during the same afternoon, but we pushed that to a later day.
Downtown Adelaide is surrounded by 19,000 acres of parkland. Among the 29 named parks, several museums, and a sports arena (The Adelaide Oval) are the Adelaide Zoo and Adelaide Botanic Garden. We visited both during our stay in December 2025.
We chose to visit the zoo on the hottest, sunniest day of our visit. Had we thought about it, we would have chosen a different day. At least three-quarters of the animals had retreated to their shelters to seek relief from the sun and heat, so we didn’t get to see many of them. But some were out, including one of their two pandas.
Here are photos of some of the animals we did see, followed by photos from Adelaide’s beautiful, expansive botanic garden.
After spending several days in Singapore, we flew five hours south to Perth, the capital of Western Australia. We spent six nights and five days there, and loved it!
Perth seemed friendly, vibrant, and safe. It has a clean, efficient public transit network of trains and buses. Its downtown has many visually interesting buildings and its suburbs (which we mainly saw from trains) look attractive. The Swan River, which is wide enough to be a lake or bay where it runs through the center of town, is beautiful. It all combines to make Perth a liveable, welcoming place.
The fact that we visited in their early summer, with temperatures in the high 70s and no rain, made our stay especially enjoyable. It was windy, though.
One day during our wonderful visit to Perth, we booked an excursion to Rottnest Island (Wadjemup), 18 km off the coast. It’s an 11 km-long, largely unspoiled island of pristine beaches, aquamarine bays, bike tracks, and walking trails. There are no cars, only a few tour buses and hundreds of bikes and e-bikes.
It’s also home to the quokka, a small, adorable marsupial that’s indigenous to Rottnest Island and a remote area of Western Australia. When Dutch sailors arrived in the 17th century, they thought the animals were large rats, which is how Rottnest (rat’s nest) Island got its modern name.
While people are instructed not to feed, touch, or disturb the quokkas, capturing a photo with one is a goal of many visitors to the island. They are not afraid of humans.
Rottnest Island has an interesting history, which we’ll touch upon in this post.
One of the highlights of our visit to Perth was the day we took a wine tour in the Swan River Valley, northeast of the city. The tour company we used, Swan Valley Tours, offered the best wine tour of any we’ve ever taken.
At the conclusion of our Southeast Asia cruise in November 2025, we stayed four extra days in Singapore to discover what that city had to offer.
Perhaps the most iconic image of Singapore is the gigantic Marina Bay Sands hotel, which opened in 2010.
While we were in Singapore, we visited several attractions at the Gardens by the Bay, a waterfront entertainment complex.
Our Southeast Asia cruise in November 2025 ended in Singapore. We stayed several extra days to explore the city.
Most days were overcast and humid, with varying probabilities of precipitation. The sunniest day was our first full day in the city, so we took that opportunity to visit the Singapore Botanic Gardens.
Most of the garden could better be described as a nice city park. It was a beautiful oasis of nature amid an otherwise crowded, overbuilt city. But it lacked the variety of interesting plants from around the world that we have found in most botanic gardens we’ve visited.
That changed when we entered the National Orchid Garden. We were amazed by the wide variety of orchid species on display. We took dozens of photos. Selecting about 20 was a challenging task.
