2001 Day 5-6 - Adelaide, Melbourne

Checkout time at the hotel was 10am, so it was a rush to meet it. One of my Net friends, Jamie from Melbourne, was, oddly enough, in Adelaide, so we spent most of the day together ... we've known each other nearly 6 years but we hadn't managed to meet until now! :) But it worked out great, and I went practically straight from Jamie's car to the airport, where I sweltered in totally un-Adelaide-like humidity waiting for my plane.

The plane flight was just over an hour, was really weird, like taking off into the clouds then coming down almost no time later. There was a lot of turbulence due to the aforementioned weather - when I got into Melbourne it was humid but fine. (It is now even more humid, cold and pelting with rain too - yes, this is a Melbourne summer.) Took the Skybus to Spencer Strete before getting a taxi to the hotel (Hotel Claremont, South Yarra) which I'd booked about a month before for my 5-day stay in Melbourne. The taxi driver told me he wouldn't stay there even if he was paid to, and said I was to receive a shock. I ignored his ramblings as that of a disgruntled taxi driver.

Anyway, I got there and paid in advance as per their policy and got to my room and ... Well, that was entirely another story. When I get home, I'll scan in the pics so you can see it, but the double bed took up 3/4 of the room. There was a bit to the left and front of the bed you could *just* squeeze through. The room looked nothing like the photos on their website. There was no fridge, no power point, communal bathroom/toilet down the corridor that stank of chlorine and smoke (the hotel is non-smoking), and the "wardrobe" was this metal wire thing. No telephone, either - they said they might have telephones by mid-2002. It was positively claustrophobic. At least I had my mobile.

So I went down and told the duty manager I was unhappy with the room - he basically said (politely) that it was budget accommodation in Melbourne and my $68 a night was an amazing bargain for the room I did get.

Thanks to my parents who looked diligently on the net (oh yeah, no phone or yellow pages either) I negotiated my way through a city of 3.5 million on public transport (with considerable help from passengers, one of whom missed two trains to find me my tram!) to find two hotels to check out. The first had no free rooms, the second, Miami Motor Inn, was amazingly good. The room which I was taken to was $70 and fully kitted out - and even a cooked breakfast chucked in. I was also impressed with the hospitality they showed to someone who had literally wandered in off the street at 11pm.

I ambled back to the Claremont one as they said I had to pay a night, so I thought I might as well use it up. The bed was comfortable enough, so it wasn't a problem. (My exotic view, by the way, was that of a truck loading zone, considering I was in the heart of the best cafe and shopping district in Melbourne).

Woke up to a cereal breakfast - the saving grace of Hotel Claremont was the overabundance of extremely good looking teenagers staying there. (Am I really that snobbish at 23 that I insist on a fully serviced twin/double room when I go to a city for a few days? :)

Had fun with the luggage, as I had to cart it by train and tram to the new place in West Melbourne. I should mention at this point that Melbourne is one of the few cities in the world to not only have maintained a tram system (most cities, including my own, abandoned it decades ago) but have made it a modern and efficient mode of transport.

The new hotel room wasn't ready yet so I went back into the city. Melbourne's weather is unpredictable at the best of times, but it was humid and/or wet for most of it. I found the 5-storey Melbourne Central/Daimaru centre in the northern CBD, but couldn't find my way out. I ended up buying a Chinese meal and 2x600mL drinks to keep me happy, and then went back to the hotel and had a well-deserved shower.

I also found the State Library of Victoria (the state of Australia which Melbourne is the capital of) which is actually really decent, and booked a couple of tours for myself (see Day 7 & 8). I spent the evening eating a nice Thai meal and standing in the subway under Flinders Street train station listening to an incredible acoustic guitar player called Chris who also had a decent voice... I might wander back there tonight and see if he's playing tonight.

Then I came back to my hotel and tried to have a conversation with Jon, however it seems to have become a rather unstable phone connection - either Orange (UK) or Optus (Aus) has issues with international bandwidth, I'd say.