Day 2 …Adelaide

Tuesday night we battled to sleep, I imagine it would be the effects of jet lag. Waking up at odd hours, and being wide awake… then we fell asleep again… Bern woke up around 10am on Wednesday and decided we needed to find some liquid refreshment. We had heard so many differing opinions of the water, and we couldn’t quite remember if we could drink it or not. Blimmen South Africans… come from Africa, of course we can drink the water!!!

So Bern literally dragged Rebecca and I out of  bed… damn, I felt like I had serious sense of humour failure.

So picture the setting. We have all probably slept 6 hours since SUNDAY night… we felt like we have serious hangovers, and needed some water. Don’t know the area, but agree that we sort of remember the way to the ‘Big W’… So we trek… to find water… food… anything… and we trek. Bernard convinced his inbuilt satellite navigation skills will get us there… and we trek… and trek… folks we must have walked 3.5km’s in like a 28 degree heat that felt like a 45 degree furnace… and we trekked. Eventually pride taking a back seat, we ask a local. She says we are heading in the opposite direction, and sends us on our way to find the closest refreshment station, which turned out to be a fish and chip shop. I would love to go into detail how good that water tasted, but I’ll get onto Aussie water later.

We managed to sight a bus stop, and some locals. Nothing like asking a long-haired teenager how you go about catching a bus…

We get onto the bus, and ask for tickets… three please… driver says ‘concession’?… so we say yes… he says ‘two tickets’?… we say ‘no, three’… he says kids under 5 go free… so I say ‘no she’s 7’… with a wink in his eye he says again ‘2 tickets, yes?’ we say ‘thank you’. Rebecca appalled that we lied, but he  saved us $1.20… that’s seven Rand!

We had to stifle much laughter, because we weren’t sure how to get the bus to stop... we learn quickly though… just watch the locals.

So we manage to get off the bus and sight MACDONALDS… yeah something familiar. We decided I would order. So I stand in the queue, this will be easy… I know MacDonalds…. Can I have a Big Mac and chips…

‘sccoooze mi’ says the pretty asian girl..

I say loudly, Big Mac and chips… uh… no.. fries…

Oh dear, why couldn’t I have asked Bern to order…

So between the south African girl and the pretty asian girl we eventually come to a general understanding of our dietary needs…

After MacDonald’s we finally arrived at the ‘Big W’ with two backpacks... managed to handle the four wheel drive trolleys quite well, you see unlike SA all wheels swivel. In SA just your front wheels swivel. Trolleys were fine… but we were hopeless. Kept holding people up in the aisles, backing up into innocent bystanders and generally acting like tourists…

Bought a whole bunch of food, filled the backpacks and found the nearest bus stop.

Board the bus, confidently ask for concession tickets, receive them and head home along the only known 3.5 km bus route…

Before I end, I just want to  point out two things we have since learnt.

1.       A concession ticket is actually only for pensioners or students, we only learnt this a few days into our bus travels. How stupid we felt.

2.       The ‘Big W’ is 3.5 km’s away from our flat… along the bus route… HOWEVER, it’s only a 900m walk if you use the Garmin navigation and find out the shortest route!

 

We have so much still to learn,