Organising (and screwing things up!) in Australia

Hello again and greetings from Australia!

So far so good, although we've spending so much time on the internet organising stuff that I don't feel we've really had the chance to settle down and enjoy it yet! We decided after New Zealand that we had spent a little more money over there than we'd anticipated, so we were going to do Australia with a different (more thrifty!) strategy. Firstly, we registered with a website called couchsurfers.com which is basically a network of travelling-minded people who use each others couches/ spare rooms when travelling, and who host travellers themselves when they're at home. We thought this sounded great, because not only do you get a free nights sleep, you also get to meet local people for a change instead of fellow travellers (no offence, fellow travellers!) Secondly, we decided that rather than rent a van for the entire duration of our stay here, we would look out for vans that need relocating somewhere else, and, erm, relocate them! Basically it works that you pay about a dollar a day for the vehicle, the company gives you some petrol allowance and you get a set amount of time to drive it from A to B. So this is our new plan of getting across Australia, although obviously that's not going to work all the time!

We arrived in Melbourne and were met at the airport by Laura and Andy (who we travelled across Laos with) and spent the next few days catching up with them. None of us are really city people so we stayed in a hostel in St. Kilda, a suburb of Melbourne, by the beach.




I suppose we could've been anywhere really, since we spent most of the time inside our hostel room challenging each other to card games (we've played more card games on this trip than in the rest of our lives; it's getting to be quite an addiction!). Oh, we also did one very silly touristy thing though: we drove to Pin Oak Court, a.k.a. Ramsay Street in the TV soap Neighbours! I have to say it didn't look much like how I remembered, and it was surprisingly small!



Laura and Andy left us after 3 days as they have a job starting, but hopefully we'll meet up again after it finishes. We have also arranged to meet up again with Neil (who we met in China and walked the Tiger Leaping Gorge with) who is about to finish his trip and return to his hometown Melbourne, but he's not going to be there for another week or so, so in the meantime we decided to make a trip to Alice Springs and Uluru (Ayers rock). As luck would have it, there were some really cheap flights going there via Adelaide.

So we took a flight to Adelaide, and here we tried the couch surfing service for the first time. A bloke called Steven responded to our request within just 5 minutes, and even offered to pick us up at the airport! Amazing! When we arrived at the airport we were wandering around for a while with no sign of Steven and I started to wonder if the couch surfing was really going to be our thing. But it turned out that Steven was there all along, and Mikko and I had walked right past him, despite him holding up a sign with our names on! Steven's really nice, really interesting to talk to, and a great host. We had a wonderful night's sleep on the sofa bed last night. Today we went into Adelaide to have a quick look around, then when we got back this evening we spent a few hours playing computer games.

Tomorrow we have an early flight on to Alice Springs, from where we hoped to hire a van for a few days and drive ourselves to Uluru and surrounding areas. One small hitch... Mikko has just checked our van rental confirmation details and it seems that instead of renting it from the 5th to 9th of March, we've got it from the 5th to 9th of April!! I tried to call them to see if there's any way we can change the booking, but they had already gone home for the day. So we'll have to wait until tomorrow to find out if they can sort it out for us, or if we've lost our money. FRUSTRATING!! Still, we've had the most amazing luck so far on our trip; we've found amazingly good deals on flights/ van rentals, etc., so I can't be too angry. Something had to backfire at some point, and I don't think we can blame anyone but ourselves for this cock-up!

More from us soon! Bye for now ;-)