Travel Tips

We finished our Wayward bus tour in Adelaide on March 27th. Adelaide is a nice little city, with lots of parks, festivals, and restaurants (highest number of restaurants per capita in Australia!). It's also a sister-city to Penang, Malaysia, and there was a festival (of course) celebrating that while we were in town, so we got a little preview of Malaysian culture and food (yum!).

We also reluctantly ;) managed to squeeze in a tour of a local chocolate factory, for its *ahem* great cultural significance. No, really! This chocolate factory is helping to lead cultural change within Australia. As it turns out, rabbits are a major pest in Australia, and they've been pushing out native species by consuming their food supply. One species that is in danger is the bilby, or long-eared bandicoot. It's a cute li'l critter, and part of the "Save the Bilby" campaign is an effort to pass the Easter Bunny's traditional duties onto the bilby. They even have children's books about how the Easter Bunny came to Australia and needed to hand over his responsibilities when he retired. The bilby won the job, and now eggs and treats are delivered by the Easter Bilby. Instead of easter bunnies, this chocolate factory is selling chocolate easter bilbies. The money raised from the sale of the chocolate bilbies is donated to the "Save the Bilby" campaign. Yeah, it might sound a bit strange, but not too much stranger than the original premise of a rabbit delivering eggs!

Continuing the "random encounter with Matt and Lara" tradition, the Adelaide YHA booked us all into the same dorm room, despite the fact that Matt and Lara had already been in Adelaide for a day before we got there. Hopefully this doesn't mean that we're going to lose each other when we're actually trying to stick together. The hostel was a great place, too: big, clean, nice showers...they recently relocated to a new building, and the one where we stayed has only been open since November 2000 or thereabouts. Nicest hostel we've stayed in so far.

After 2 days in Adelaide, it was time to head to the Outback!