The last time I was in Melbourne was more than 20 years ago. I’d just graduated and was in the city to participate in the Australasian Debates as an adjudicator. As much of our slightly more than the week long stay was centered over the event (I was there to ‘work’ since I considered adjudication duties as such!), I never quite had the time to really explore the city as much as I would have liked; made also the more difficult as I was responsible for a team of university debaters that the University’s Student Affairs Office had politely told me I was going to have to mother-hen. My main takeaway that stay was centered on the weather – that it was cold and the sun seemed to be in perpetually hiding all the time – and there was an almost Gothic-general look/feel to the city.
Our outbound trip was uneventful. The Emirates return flight we’d booked had a code-share with Qantas for the outbound, and that required a separate charge for travelers to choose and reserve preferred seats, and amounted to S$120 for the four of us. With the benefit of hindsight, the reservation of seats was probably unnecessary after all. The midnight flight – QF38 – was half-full, and we had plenty of seats to adjust ourselves with, and a very fortunate occurrence too as it permitted the kids to sleep outstretched, though the both of us struggled to get any kind of sleep!
The flight was smooth without anything passing very minor turbulence, and the plane landed 20 minutes before scheduled time too. Inflight breakfast was served a couple of hours before landing, and well – even Hannah couldn’t finish more than a quarter of the plate of egg omelette/hashbrowns/sausage that was served, and she normally eats everything. The stuff was just too oily and seemed to over-rely on salt as a taste enhancer.
Customs clearance took a while, and could had been longer were it not for the family express queue we benefited from. The first stop after baggage claim was to get a stack of Optus My Prepaid Daily Plus data SIM cards. The Optus shop is right in-front of the gate when you step out from the arrival gate. For $2/day and periods of 5 or 10 days, you get a data SIM card and a daily download limit of 500MB. That’s an amazing deal that has nothing similar in Singapore, the wired up the wazoo nation we are supposed to be. A note though: tablet devices make use of a different plan where it’s $10 for a download limit of 1GB over the period. Still pretty generous and more than sufficient for our use after we supplement it with in-room and public WIFI. The queue was pretty long at the Optus shop though and moved slowly, so it was more than 30 minutes before we got the 3 data nano SIM cards at $50.
Booking transportation from the airport to the city was easy too, and there are no apparent benefits to booking the SkyBus ticket online. We’d wanted to keep our options open, so ended up with the original plan of going with SkyBus (saving ourselves a bit of cash compared to a cab), and booked at the bus counter at the airpot. The ticket reservation was very quick (done in a minute), and the family package for us cost $38 each way. The bus pick-up point is right in-front of the Domestic terminal entrance – just a minute walk away from the International terminal exit – and the bus runs every 10 minutes.
The SkyBus took about 20 minutes to cover the distance from the airport to Southern Cross Station. The drop-off is right in front of their Station’s ticketing office, so it’s easy to get the hotel transfer right there. For the return trip, you can just get the hotel to call SkyBus back to arrange for your complementary hotel transfer back to Southern Cross Station. There were about a dozen travelers – including us four – in the hotel transfer bus, and it took another 10 minutes to cover the distance from the Station to our hotel. As the driver for the hotel transfer service quipped: the city center isn’t that big, but from the Station, it’s also just about too far to walk with luggage.
More in the next post!
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