Driving From Melbourne to Adelaide (A Glimpse at Australia & Australian)

My dad rented a Toyota Tarago (or in Malaysia it is called Toyota Estima) for our trip. This was our only transport for the next 7 days.
So, with merely 2 hours of sleep, we started our journey from Melbourne to Adelaide with the help of a GPS navigation device. It took us a while to get familiar with the GPS system and we took some wrong turns initially. After a few scolding (at the GPS system), we finally learnt to use it.
There was nothing much along the highway. There were trees, wheat fields, bushes, mountains and sand. These kept on repeating and repeating and repeating…. Zzzzzz

Australians do observe the rule pretty well. They obey the speed limits and never once exceeding them; usually only those non-Australians fly along all roads and highways. I heard that unlike some countries, Australia police are not ‘coffee lovers’, there is no way you could treat them some money for coffee if you are caught speeding. And if you do, they would probably spend the night with them behind bars.

We past by a few small towns which looked like abandoned, maybe because I was too get used to the life in a developing country that when I find a nicely developed town in a rural area with almost no people around, I thought that they were haunted. I guess this is what they called stress-free or relaxing country life.

So, we drove from Melbourne, past through Ballarat, Ararat, Horsham and then to a town called Bordertown. It was a town at South Australia state, near to Victoria state border. One interesting about this town was they convert a gaol or small prison cell to toilet. Finally there was a chance for me to experience peeing in a prison cell.

From 6am, traveling around 700km journey, we finally reached Adelaide at around 4pm. Gee, a tiring but enjoying first day!

1am at Melbourne Airport

Melbourne Airport name, Tullamarine really sounds like what I called one of my friend, Irene, who easily gets angry – ‘Tulan Irene’. (Tulan in Hokkien means angry, but it is not a polite word).

My family and I arrived Tullamarine Airport at 1am. Since the car rental office opened at 5.30am, we initially planned to sleep in the airport with our luggage as our pillow or bolster.

However 1am Australia time was actually 10pm Malaysia time, so I went exploring the airport instead. I seemed like living in the movie “ I am legend”, there was no one around at all.

After exploring for a while, a strange sound caught my ear. It was a pig snorting sound followed by bird whistling sound and it kept repeating. I traced the sound, and found out that it was just someone snoring loudly.

I realized that Satan or the god of hell was actually doing luggage service in this airport.

While Nando’s Australia was teaching the children something they will need in future. By the way, giving the bird means giving the finger, if you don’t get me. Check here for more information.

One good thing about Melbourne Airport was that there was a Porsche on display. Still didn’t know whether it was tax free or not.

Entering Australia Is Really Tough

Entering Australia seems like a difficult task. Other than the usual visa and passport check by Malaysian Custom, or through Malaysia Passport Autogate,there would be another manual passport inspection and interview session by some officers before you were placed in an isolated room.Yup, Australia bonded passengers was isolated from other passengers. For a while I felt like I had some disease until could not breath the same air as other passengers.

The air plane would need to be sterilized by some chemical spraying before reaching Australia for insect control reason. Luckily they announced that before spraying, else I would have thought someone farted.

Everyone going into Australia would need to fill an Incoming Passenger Card. The back side looked normal like all immigration card for any country.

The front part was where all those tricky questions came in. Example, Questions 9 had me cleaning my shoe in the washroom; and Question 8 had me checking my shoe whether it was made from animal skin or not.

According to my brother, it was always good to declare something even if you have nothing to declare. The reason was that if you were caught with undeclared item, the officer would slap you with a minimum AUD300 fine.

All bags would need to be x-rayed and dogs would be deployed to smell you and your bags.

These scanning and smelling would be done in an isolated area before you were released to mingle with other Australians.

Somehow, I still didn’t understand why they were putting the posters below in the toilet. Were they trying to tell me something?

Air Asia X Experience

Yeah, I’m back after a long vacation in Australia. Time to share some of my experiences since the first day till the day I came back. So my next few blogs would be about my trip in Australia.

Have you fly with Air Asia X? The slogan is “Now Everyone Could Fly Xtra long”.

I really agree with them:

1. Xtra long queue, although they opened up more counters for my trip.

Still there are lots of people!

Anyway, thanks to the lady at the counter for checking me in.

2. Xtra long flying time. I flew for 9 hours, from day timetill night.

3. Xtra long backpain. Look at the distance between the seats. If you could are not sitting in those XL seat, better prepare something for your back.

As for the meal, if you book online, you can opt for international meal or local meal set. For international meal, I had chicken with potatoes and long beans; whereas local meal was Nasi Lemak.

A complete meal set consisted of the food, a bottle of mineral water and a chocolate bar.

At first I was surprised that there was an entertainment system available at every seat. But my surprise was taken away after I learnt we need to pay for the movies, music and games.

One interesting thing about the entertainment system is that we could chat with other passengers just like those Internet Messenger stuff, but please make sure you ping the correct pretty girl or handsome guy in the plane. I almost ended up chatting with the wrong person (Hey, he looked like a girl, type like a girl until he said his name was Jefferson. Knowing that, I changed my seat because luckily there were empty seats around. I was in seat 51H, so my username is 51H, and it could not be erased, unless you are the air-stewardess or air-steward or maybe the pilot… I think)