Civilisation!!!

Here I am in Adelaide now, the capital of South Australia. The YHA here is quite nice. I'm SO happy that I'm staying here! So clean and well run.

I've already met heaps of people that I've met on my travels previously. One is a girl who was in my room in the YHA Darwin and one is a girl who was on my Fraser Island trip.

So far, I like Adelaide, though I've only been here for about 5 hours. I've had a bit of a drive around in the tour bus when we came into town, a nice shower, a nice free dinner with free apple pie and cream (that's whipped cream to all us westerners).

Sadly, I'm back to the cool weather. It's currently 11 degrees. The high for the rest of the week is only 17 degrees. Low of 8 degrees. Brr.

I think I'm spoiled. I guess I'll just have to pull my jeans out of the bottom of my pack again.

Tomorrow is laundry and research day.
I really need clean clothes and I really need to decide what I'm going to do and when during the next week.

I want to go to Kangaroo Island and the Flinders Ranges, both of which come highly recommended to me.

I'm meeting friends of Tony for a picnic in the hills on Saturday. Should be nice!

The 2-day tour to Adelaide was, well, QUICK. But the tour guide was really nice and our group had a really good dynamic. I had a lot of fun.

The best part was when we had a balloon-animal competition. Team Canada's submission was a multi-coloured moose. I thought it was quite good. Team Japan had several entries, including a really nice poodle. But, alas, Team Korea stole the prize with a rather dirty old man. So they won the packet of TimTams.

We stayed overnight last night in Coober Pedy, the opal mining capital of the world, apparently. It's also quite hot in the desert there, so many people live in houses dug out of the rock (called "dug outs").

We stayed in underground accommodation there, and had a drink at the underground bar, as well.

Looking forward to catching up on my emails and getting organized and eating a leisurely breakfast tomorrow.

I love cities.