Things to Do in Adelaide in June

The Coorong stretches southeast of Adelaide as a narrow, wind-scoured lagoon system separated from the Southern Ocean by the sand dunes of Younghusband Peninsula. On this full-day kayaking tour, you paddle through still, tea-coloured water flanked by samphire flats and paperbarks, the only sounds the dip of your blade and the sharp call of pelicans congregating on sandbars. In June, the Coorong's birdlife intensifies as migratory waders arrive. The cooler air means you paddle without the searing summer heat that can make this exposed landscape punishing.

Kangaroo Island sits a short ferry ride from Cape Jervis. But it feels like a fragment of older Australia that the mainland forgot. This two-day small-group wildlife tour covers the island's south coast, where waves hammer sculptured granite at Remarkable Rocks and New Zealand fur seals haul out on the boulders at Admirals Arch in colonies so dense you can smell their oily musk from the boardwalk above. At dusk, the guide takes you to known koala habitat in the drooping sheoak woodland near Hanson Bay, where you stand in cold, still air listening for the rustle and guttural bellow of males calling through the canopy.

South Australia's two premier wine regions sit on opposite sides of Adelaide, and this private tour lets you choose between them based on what you want to drink and what kind of landscape you want to drink it in. McLaren Vale sprawls across rolling hills above the coast, its shiraz and grenache vines dormant in June but the cellar doors warm with wood fires and the scent of toasting oak from barrel rooms. The Adelaide Hills, twenty minutes east up the freeway into the Mount Lofty Ranges, runs cooler and greener, its sauvignon blanc and pinot noir producers tucked into misty valleys where the air smells of damp fern and apple orchard.

A classic Mustang convertible is an improbable vehicle for a South Australian winter wine tour, which is exactly why this half-day private drive through the Barossa Valley works so well. Two passengers sit low in the back seat, wrapped in blankets the operator provides, as the car rumbles past stone-walled vineyards along Seppeltsfield Road, exhaust note bouncing off hundred-year-old palm trees planted in ruler-straight rows. The cold air carries the mineral smell of freshly turned vineyard soil and the faintly sweet scent of fermenting juice from winery sheds, and stops at cellar doors let you thaw your fingers around a glass of fortified tawny in a barrel hall where the temperature barely changes year-round.

Adelaide is a city designed for walking. Colonel Light's 1836 grid means the entire CBD sits inside a square mile of parklands, and this guided walking tour covers the layers of history compressed into that compact grid, from the convict-free founding vision carved into the stone of Parliament House to the laneway bars that have colonised former bank vaults and horse stables. In June, the walking pace suits the weather: cool enough that you stay comfortable for two hours on your feet, and the low winter sun throws long shadows down King William Street that make the Victorian and Edwardian architecture photograph with unusual drama.

Hahndorf sits in the Adelaide Hills twenty minutes from the city, a town founded by Prussian Lutherans in 1839 whose German heritage survives in the stone cottages, the Poike smokehouse scent that drifts across the main street, and the bakeries turning out pretzels and streuselkuchen behind steamed-up windows. This e-bike tour takes you beyond the tourist strip and into the surrounding hills, where the electric assist earns its keep on the steep climbs through vineyard rows and orchards, the cold June air sharp with the smell of wet soil and fallen apples. Stops at smaller cellar doors and farm gates along the route include tastings of cool-climate wines, local cheeses, and seasonal produce that you would never find without a guide who knows which gates to open.