May 1st, 2006 - Adelaide Blues

We drove back to Adelaide via a famous wine region, the Barossa Valley - can anyone guess who's idea it was to go there? It's opnly fair I drag Laure to National parks she drags me to wineries - lush ;) We returned our third consecutive rental car without a hitch, driving on the left side of the road is starting to be fully instinct. It took almost a year for me to finally stop second guessing myself crossing the street and now I'm going home! We left our bags in a storage locker in Adelaide and enjoyed a relaxing afternoon and evening in Adelaide shopping for a tour book for South East Asia and treating oursleves to a celebratory meal at an Indian restaurant. Ironically, it seems we came to Australia to discover the culture and yet we ate Indian 7 times out of ten when we ate out. Then it was off to the airport for a quick sleep before our flight at 6 am the next morning. The only problem was that we were kicked out of the airport and caught a bus back into the city to find a backpacker's at 11:00 at night. It seems that Adelaide is a domestic airport and unlike in North America it closes from the last flight to 2 hours beforte the firs flight! We stayed at a YHA and left at 4:30 to get back to the airport for our flight on our same old public transit bus. It would have been fine if either of us had slept, but someone upstairs was running a marathon, the music was pumping and both of us were worried about oversleeping! To top it all off the next day when we were waiting at Tullamarine, I noticed I had been bitten by bed bugs - nasty! Getting from Avalon airport to Tullamarine was a breeze going the other way with the exception of going into the city one bus and out on another and there was no expensive cab ride. We spent all day in the airport and after waiting 5 hours and were just about ready to board, we realized that we were scheduled to arrive in Singapore at 10:30 and decided we'd better call and reserve a place. We used the last bit of our calling card and managed to get a confirmed double in Little India. After a long shower and brushing my teeth, and with the 2 hour time difference, I slept like a rock.