Roaming on prepaid - utter shambles

I have just relocated to the UK. Before leaving, I changed from contract to prepaid and also sought advice from the store and the contact centres about how to activate call and Sms roaming. I was told to SMS "travelon" to 123 just before leaving. When I did so, i got a response to say that 135 is no longer in service and was sent a USSD code to SMS. This also failed to work. I am now in the UK and unable to make or receive calls or SMSs, which is profoundly inconvenient. All Vodacom customer care channels are useless- Tobi simply states that roaming is automatically part of my package and then tries to get an agen to call me, which is not going to work as I'm not connected to a network. The customer service email response seems to be set up the same way, being predicated around the ability to have a call with an agent. Clearly this will not work under these circumstances. Please can someone rectify this soonest. I can be contacted by email or whatsapp