Things go South

I once worked with someone from Florida, and we were talking once about whether it was considered to be part of the South or not. She said that northern Florida is very much Southern, but as you go further south, you start hitting retirees from New York, so the north is south, but the south is north.

We did not have good look with southern continental Australia. We did have a good time on various islands that were further south, and technically South Australia is a specific region, whereas when we were further east, we were in Victoria. Sorry if it gets a little confusing.

The point is, Tasmania could be considered far South, but it is an island, and it was beautiful, and we had a great time there. Kangaroo Island is in the region of South Australia, but is still an island, and despite some hardships there were good times. Phillip Island is in the state of Victoria, and is so close to the mainland that you go by bridge instead of needing a ferry, but still, it is an island, and that was a relatively good day. The points in between were full of disappointment.

From Tasmania we flew to Adelaide. Part of the problem may have been that we heard really good things about Adelaide, that it had a really nice feel, and we were told that we would love it. We did not love it.

It was crowded with mall rats and clubbers, and we were accosted by more inebriated people there than anywhere else on the trip. I know it was the weekend, but still. We were able to accomplish some important errands there, like getting on the internet to see that my transfer had gone through to Julie's account, allowing me to have cash again. I was able to buy a wallet and a new memory card, and new batteries for my glaucometer, all of which was very necessary, but we don't go on vacation to shop. Businesses that we thought looked interesting turned out to be closed when we got there. We had the opposite of good feelings.

Now, we did not worry about this too much, because we were only there Friday, and then we were leaving early Saturday morning for Kangaroo Island. (Most of the inebriated people were encountered while we were waiting for pickup, 6 AM Saturday morning, as they were coming away from dancing and cards. Some were outside the mall the previous day, but most of them were here. A pair of them tried hitting on my sisters.) Well, the bus did come, we went to the ferry, and that has already been explored.

When I wrote from the road, I mentioned that our tour group was a mini-United Nations, and that we had bonded quite a bit from our two days together. We all sat in nearby rows on the ferry back. The husband in the Taiwanese couple was in the front, and he looked back over us all and said "A team." (Which was pretty good for him. They did not speak much English. It did not matter for most of the trip, but it is why I can't tell you their names.) We did feel like a team.

It all fell apart when we got on the buses. They started dividing us up by which hotels and hostels we were going to, so that split us in half. Then the bus ended up being really crowded, and struggling for seats we ended up separating more. I should have sat with Victoria, but I was trying to at least be near my sisters, and that didn't work out either. I didn't see her again.

Since I did not end up near my sisters, I did not know that towards the end of the ride, Maria needed to visit the bathroom twice, and was actually getting quite sick. We got dumped at the hostel and checked in there around eleven, and we were supposed to be at the pickup point for the next leg of the journey at 6 AM the next day. Maria was sick as a dog, and the next three days were going to consist of long bus rides and long hikes. It was not looking good.

This is why at midnight, Julie and I were searching airfare and hotel rates, trying to see what alternatives were workable to get us out of Adelaide if we could not manage the scheduled tour. Unfortunately, the hotel we had already booked in Melbourne for the end of the tour did not have availability, and booking anything for the next day is difficult, but we finally arranged a flight to Melbourne and a hotel.

I went to the tour and let them know we wouldn't be coming, which they appreciated, but it was too late to refund, and that's what I had expected. She did say if we had travel insurance they should cover it, but we didn't. Maria woke up feeling a little better, but Julie was not feeling great. Handling a short trip to the airport and a short flight did seem possible though, so we thought it would just be extra time in Melbourne. Not exactly.

Well, it's not really a surprise when the main airport for a city is not in the middle of the city. However, we did not realize exactly how bad the urban sprawl of Melbourne was, and not knowing the geography, we ended up at a hotel that was quite close to the airport, and close to absolutely nothing else. This led to several problems.

The first issue was that the cabbie launched into a huge lecture at us for wasting his time, and that we should have told him where it was sooner, I guess so he could have decided to not take us. The funny thing was that I had specific the name of the hotel and the street (Best Western on Ardlie) when I first gave him the location, but he was not listening at all. The upside of being lectured on taking a short cab ride is that it is a short cab ride, but we were nonetheless a little irritated. I was watching the meter and thinking about how I was not going to tip him. It ended up on $14.00 and he looked at me without blinking an eye and said $16.00, but maybe it was the airport surcharge. I gave him the exact amount. I thought about telling him that if he had not been a jerk he would have gotten a good tip (which would be true, we are excellent tippers), but I just wanted him gone.

So, now we checked in and received our second lecture of the day on how horrible it is to book through Travelocity, because it always messes everything up and (the desk clerk) always needs to end up talking to them on the phone to get it billed right. I have been booking through Travelocity for several years, and that has never been a problem, and I did ask at the desk later, and they did not actually have an issue billing it, so I feel like maybe the real problem was her, but okay.

The next issue is that being in the middle of nowhere, no one would deliver to us. Well, actually none of the places we called even knew where we were. There was a restaurant attached to the hotel, but it was really overpriced. Julie and I tried walking to find something, and we found a grocery store with not much, a restaurant that was closed Mondays, and restaurant that was closed permanently, and a pub with no take-out. We also found a bakery, but none of the fare was practical. Eventually, we were able to get a hold of Dominos. Those people deliver anywhere, though I was really sick of them by then.

Things were starting to where us down, and I started getting persistent queries about changing the tickets and going home early. I was resisting, but I understood where it was coming from.

There was one thing that the hotel really had going for it, and that was a shuttle to the mall. We decided we would spend the next day at the mall. The day after that we could head to our real hotel, and things would be better then for sure.

Actually, the mall was the best thing that happened to us on the southern mainland (well, Maru wasn't bad, but that kind of goes with Phillip Island.) We wandered around different stores. We had a food court where we could have some variety of inexpensive food. We had material for reading and writing so we could use our time somewhat productively, and when the time still seemed to drag a bit, we went to see a movie. "The House Bunny" was better than I expected. You kind of have to take it as a fairy tale where Hef is not a disgusting old man, but they do set it up that way with the opening narration. Anyway, that worked out, and we had an okay day without having to hike anywhere.

We were not sure what would be the best way to get to our other hotel, so I discussed it at length with a different desk clerk, a nice one. We had initially been looking at the train, but we were worried about proximity to the actual hotel from the station, and she had never heard of the Albany, where we were going, or the street where it was on. She looked up the address and photocopied the map, which ended up being very helpful, because no one had ever heard of the Albany.

Worried about that, we decided to go back to the airport instead, and take the hotel shuttle. They had never heard of it, so would not let us have door-to-door service, just a drop off in their main neighborhood. Okay, we would take another cab. That driver had also never heard of the Albany or Millswyn Street, but with the map and his GPS we made it, and he had no complaints about the trip being short. We did not end up being at all near the train station, so we probably made the right call, though we felt like we were just throwing money away.

I'm afraid the Albany was kind of a dive. They had a rock and roll theme going on, with classic 70's photography of musicians, including the stones from a time when Keith Richards did not look old and dessicated (I was not born yet), so maybe it was appropriate to be a dive. The bathroom was nasty, the room was narrow, and the elevator could not be trusted. The staff was nice though, and I heard one guest arranging a return trip, so maybe it was just us.

Anyway, we still had an extra day (we should have been on the last leg of the Great Ocean Road tour), so we had been told that the Victoria Market was the place for souvenirs. We had held off on buying things because of the luggage limit for the Great Ocean Road tour, which of course we had missed anyway, so, okay, we would make up for it here. The next day was another all-day tour, and then we took off for New Zealand the following day, so this was pretty much our last chance.

We asked for directions, and followed them, in the process learning how to get tram and bus tickets and ride them. I should mention that in many cases this has you standing in the middle of the road on a very narrow strip, and that Melbourne seemed to be the place where we were most likely to die. We didn't though. We managed to find our way there, constantly referring to the map, and as we arrived we learned in was closed Wednesdays. I guess we did feel that it would have been nice for the staff to mention this while they were giving directions. We ended up just going into a regular souvenir shop one block away from the train station, where we probably overpaid.

The other indignity of Melbourne was that we selected the Albany because when we were booking it listed laundry among the amenities, and I had calculated that we would need to do laundry here. We could have done it at the Best Western, but that would have thrown off the number of days before the next chance, plus it was three dollars a load, so we waited. The Albany used to have laundry, but they closed down the room. So we ended up toting a very heavy bag many streets away to a laundromat where it was four dollars a load. Curses.

We did find a nice restaurant there. While the loads were going we were looking for dinner, and most of the restaurants were really pricey, but we found one, Piazza Navona, that was affordable, and the pizza ended up being really good. So, if you are ever in South Yarra, Melbourne, consider it. It is near the corner of Toorak and Punt.

As you can see, the pictures we have of this stage of the trip are very boring. There is a newspaper office that you can see from the Best Western (notice the rolled up newspaper sculpture standing next to it), a plastic Oregon Christmas tree (of which I do not see the point) in their equivalent of Wal-mart, the plane shot (which I could have taken anywhere), and the pig statues from Adelaide.

We were gone for a month, so it's reasonable to expect that there would be some snags, but it was getting irritating.