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  • Day 139

    There goes the plan

    March 24, 2020 in Australia ⋅ ☀️ 29 °C

    The suspicions were already there yesterday, but we woke up with the confirmation that our flight connection we booked 2 days ago had been cancelled. The UAE shut down its flights, affecting not only the airline Emirates as initially reported, but also Etihad. This made it clear for us that the solution will be repatriation. The most unfortunate thing about the flight cancellation is financial. It doesn't look like we'll get to see our money back. Instead we get a voucher valid for a booking made before September 30th. We feel bad about having booked it but felt pressured to try.

    As the repatriation plans are very unclear it isn't easy to plan the upcoming days. We're on the way to Perth, trying to enjoy our time and see stuff, but at the same time we don't want to lose out on a flight if they happen to announce it very late. So we're covering a lot of ground, not wanting to be too far off Perth in case something happens.

    After 3 hours driving, we arrived in the village Dalwallinu. We looked a bit around and were told by a local that people from Perth were coming all the way here (that's 250km) to buy huge amounts of groceries. Therefore they are now limiting almost everything. We were able to buy some vegetables and fruit and had lunch. Generally we got the feeling we weren't that welcome anymore as tourists.

    We drove further to find a place to sleep. We had the choice of two highways here, such a luxury. We could stay on the 95 or go on the similarly ETA'd 115. We chose the latter because the campsite options along it were more favourable. However after a few km they announced roadworks, which is normally fine but in this case the road was completely unsealed for quite some time. We're not allowed to drive too far on that so we stopped and checked the road services website. As that wasn't informative enough we had to call them, but the employee on the phone was more than useless. We didn't see it return to sealed for awhile and the website indicated it might be the case for another 40km. So we had to turn around and take the other highway while looking for alternative rest stops as the sun went down. Not ideal for driving but we made it to a very nice community camping in another tiny town.
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