Adelaide & Kangaroo Island

We arrived in Adelaide late in the evening straight after our Great Ocean Road tour. We had booked in the Backpack Oz hostel, just because we knew they had free BBQ dinner on Wednesdays. Who's a sucker for free food?

On Thursday we discovered there's not much to do in central Adelaide. We took a stroll around the Botanical Gardens, and visited the National Wine Centre which had a visually very nice but content-wise pretty generic exhibition about Australian wines. We didn't really feel like doing museums, even though they were all in the same block and free. Instead, most of the time we spent outside the hostel was in the public library, enjoying the joys of 2-hours-a-day free internet. Second most popular way to pass time was grocery shopping. Whoa...

Friday was departure time for our tour to visit Kangaroo Island, the second biggest island in Oz. I have mixed feelings about this tour: it was pretty pricey for just two days (loads of fun but not really worth that money), included too much driving around, and also doing the bumby ferry rides was not really my cup of tea. The group of 21 was a bit too large to achieve an intimate atmosphere. However, we did a lot of enjoyable things on the island. We went to see a couple of pretty beaches and climbed up a hill for a nice view. We saw penguins, seals, and more kangaroos and koalas. The highlight of the trip was definitely visiting a group of sea lions on the Seal Bay beach. They were sooo cute that we turned all squeeling and girly.

I also liked staying on a farm, where we slept in a shed (which smelled slightly of cows - I didn't mind though, just reminded me of my grandparents' farm) and woke up to a pile of warm pancakes for a breakfast.

On Sunday we again did nothing, as we just wanted to rest and were to wake up early on Monday to head to our next destination, Alice Springs.

Well, things don't always go as planned, as we definitely had not aimed at participating in our private Amazing Race on Monday. We left the hostel well in time, only to find that our shuttle bus to the airport was late. After 15 min I called the booking centre and they told me the bus would be there very soon. In the end, the car came 30 minutes late. We sat on the bus and were starting to feel pretty stressed out, when the driver kept stopping everywhere and was driving slower than my grandma would (who doesn't have a drivers license). On arrival to the airport, the was 35 minutes left before the departure of our flight. I grabbed our tickets and ran inside the terminal to do self check-in, while Inka collected our backpacks and pretended to be a carrying mule. The check-in machine gave me an error message and told me to go to the service desk, where I was directed to the check-in counters. I proceed to the baggage drop desk, as there's a huge queue in front of the normal desks. I hand in our tickets and the flight attendant accepts them, even though we get some bad eye for showing up at the closing time of check-in. We are so relieved. That is, until a slight problem turns up: our tickets were for the flight on Sunday.

...

F***!

The attendant check if we could still buy seats for this flight, but first, the flight is full, and second, it's too late anyway since the check-in is already closed. Our tickets are not valid anymore and there won't be any refund. We visit the sales desk, but neither Qantas nor Jetstar have seats left for that day, and also the following day there are seat available only in the business class, which obviously is out of our league budget-wise. Tiger is also full for the next two days. We consult the lady at a downstairs tourist information, but she informs us that the bus tickets would cost 500 dollars each (Easter), and also the train doesn't leave before Wednesday. There is a 2-day shuttle tour, but they also only do Wednesday and Saturday departures. Looks like there's no way for us to get to Alice Springs in time to go on our Wednesday-Friday tour of Uluru, Kaja Tjuta and Kings Canyon.

We take a bus back to the city centre and take asylum in the library, determined to come up with a plan, what to do next. I find reasonably-priced flights for Thursday morning and book them. I cancel our accomodation and the tour in Alice Springs, and let them know we didn't make it on the flight, but we'll get there on Thursday. We book a new, expensive 1-day tour for Friday.

We look for a hostel to stay in Adelaide. It being Easter, there's nothing, nichts, nada available for the same day, at least in our price range. We find a cheap hostel in a nearby beach town Glenelg, 30 min tram ride from Adelaide, and take it. We take our bags, decide to forget it all, and spend three lazy days on the beach doing nothing, except for reading novels and catching up on celebrity gossip in the local library's magazine room.

We can only laugh at ourselves and at what happened. All along we thought the flight was on Monday, we both had that date in our calendars and in all our plans, and apparently didn't bother to double-check the date on the ticket. (We did check all our other tickets after this happened, surprise!)

I've always wondered who would be stupid, unorganized, messy enough to miss their flight. Now I know.