An early morning text message from Mum alerted me to her incredible speed and willingness to assist as she had despatched the two dive computers with FedEx as soon as she got home from work yesterday and they are expected to be in Sydney on Tuesday.
We had to pack our gear and shift rooms this morning as we had extended our three nights stay in Adelaide to five nights two days ago.
In the limbo between checking out of one room and checking into another we returned to the snack bar to have some breakfast. When we had checked into our new room for the next two nights we then arranged accommodation for the following four nights, until we reach Sydney for the second time, and returned to the cyber cafe for 3 hours editing. I sent some e-mails and completed the updating of my journal.
When the hottest part of the day had just passed, and it was still in the mid 30s, we walked up Rundle Street in search of a bookshop selling the Lonely Planet Diving and Snorkelling Great Barrier Reef guidebook. The equivalent book for the Maldives, which our Israeli friend Tomer had on Blue Shark II, was excellent reference and listed most of the dive sites we enjoyed during our time there. We gave up on our search pretty quickly and walked to the University of Adelaide in search of a Henry Moore sculpture which was supposed to be somewhere in the grounds. We couldn't find it and I guessed it had been relocated. I suspect Ian was secretly looking for something resembling my camel...
Walking through the Botanic Gardens was pleasant enough thanks to the shade provided by the pergolas. The blue sky was perfectly clear all day long.
We idly walked back to the cyber cafe popping into bookshops along the way and began another 3 hour session. 2 hours into it, when I had just finished typing a huge e-mail to my parents, I clicked 'send' and thought about copying the text in case it fell over. Then it fell over and I lost the screen and corresponding text, therefore the opportunity to copy the e-mail. In fact, all of the pcs in the cyber cafe had lost there internet connection which prompted the system administrator to get on the telephone to their service provider and Ian to begin pinging IP addresses to see if he could fathom it out. He decided it must be something to do with a local router or switch and offered his expertise. The next time I looked up to guage what was going on, I found Ian crawling around on the floor fiddling with boxes. Several minutes later, after more crawling around on the floor and communicating with the man on the other end of the telephone, presumably the cyber cafe manager, Ian had identified the bios problem and fixed it. Naturally I captured a couple of the system administrator moments of Ian in his element on camera. I knew it wouldn't be long before he tried to 'work' again.
The system administrator was very grateful to my hero who had reinstated the order and business of the cyber cafe for the evening and offered us each a further 6 hours of internet time free of charge. So, for AUD 40 today we received 24 hours of internet time which, by our calculations, is pretty damn good. Well done Ian.
More cake and hot chocolate was in order to complete our day. On the way back to the hostel we witnessed a drunken man who was laying in the road in the recovery position being picked up by an ambulance. The old man had two police officers and their horses stood over him until the ambulance arrived.
Copyright 2003 Helen Fuller. All rights reserved.