Brisbane

I was up fairly early on Thursday 18 May for the flight from Sydney to Brisbane, the first of several on Jet Star (a budget airline subsidiary of Quantas - similar to Mango and SAA). We had some good views of Sydney taking off and of the coastline near Brisbane coming in to land. Andre was waiting at the arrival gate to greet me (a nice feature of Aus airports is that anyone can go through security, so you can meet or see someone off right at the gate to the plane itself). After collecting my bag, we headed to Andre and Heather's home out to the West of Brisbane. That is a lovely "Queenslander" style home on two acres of eucalyptus bush/forest, and with amazing views out over the surrounding hills. After lunch, Andre headed back into work, while I relaxed. In the evening, his parents were having their Australian citizenship ceremony, to which I was able to tag along. It was really interesting to see the mix of formality and casualness that applied (a very jovial DJ character managed the whole event, with various civic officials making speeches and performing the legal "bits"), and the diversity and number of people becoming Australians. On the way to the ceremony, which was up in the North part of Brisbane, Heather took me up to a view point, Mt Coot-tha, which had superb views of the city and the Brisbane River.

The Friday morning was spent relaxing, before Heather and I went into town and picked Andre up from his work place in the city to drive up to Mooloolaba on the Sunshine Coast, where we were to spend the weekend in a lovely holiday flat on the beachfront. It was a little grey and drizzly, but we did go for a walk on the beach in the rain when we got there.

Fortunately, the weather had improved considerably on Saturday and we headed up North to Sunshine Beach, from where we walked along the coast to Noosa Heads. The coastal walk was beautiful, along golden beaches and over rocky cliffs. We caught a bus back to Sunshine Beach, and then headed back South of Mooloolaba for an afternoon walk around Point Cartwright. For dinner, we decided to get some fish and chips from a fish shop on the Mooloolaba docks, which sold really fresh fish, as well as cooked fish of a wide range of types. I chose the barramundi, which is very Australian, and was very delicious.

On the Sunday morning I decided that, as a matter of principle, I needed to go for a swim in the Pacific Ocean (this side of it anyway - the other side had been swum in on a visit to Hawaii several years ago!). After that I managed to fit in a quick geocache, which was very close to our holiday flat, before we checked out of the flat. We took the slow, scenic route home via Caloundra where we enjoyed another long walk along the beach front, and via Maleny for a stunning viewpoint over the Glass House Mountains. We stopped off on our way into Brisbane for tea and melktert with Andre's parents. Later on the Andre and Heather's non-resident children came around for a family dinner.

On Monday morning I went into Brisbane with Heather for the day. We explored a bit of the South Bank area, and took a River Cat ferry down and back up the river. I had lunch from Subway who had been torturing me advertising a delicious-sounding pulled pork special since I arrived in Australia - it was good, if not quite as amazing as it sounded! We also spent a bit of time exploring the Queensland Museum, which had a special exhibit of photos of the planets in the solar system, which were absolutely beautiful.

On Tuesday, while eating breakfast there were two kangaroos grazing in the garden (nice to see them in the wild)! I went into town early with Andre on his commute, and enjoyed a coffee in the City Botanic Gardens, which have an interesting mangrove walk along the river (these were the original botanic gardens, before the new gardens were established near Mt Coot-tha, and these became more of a city park than "proper" botanic gardens). I wandered around the QUT campus for a bit, which adjoins the Botanic Gardens, and has some beautiful old historical buildings, then headed across the river intended to spend an hour or so at the Queensland Maritime Museum. That turned out to be fascinating and took up a substantial part of the day. In particular they have an old warship (WW2 frigate, the HMAS Diamantina), which you can wander around quite freely with an audio tour. There was also some interesting history of the dry dock around which the Museum is based (and in which the Diamantina and a lighthouse ship are displayed). I headed back across the river and had a late lunch in the City Botanic Gardens again, before exploring the Queen Street shopping precinct. I also visited the City Hall, which includes the Museum of Brisbane with some interesting art and displays of the history of Brisbane. On my way back to meet Andre at work at the end of the day, I spent abit of time browsing around Dymocks bookstore - allegedly Brisbane's biggest, and very impressive.

Wednesday was a relatively quiet day. I did some laundry, and took a long walk in the area to get another Queensland geocache.

On the Thursday morning, I packed and Heather took me to the airport, via the Brisbane Botanic Gardens (the "proper" ones near Mt Coot-tha), where had a good wander around (a beautiful Japanese garden, and quite a lot of Southern African plants featured). We got to Brisbane airport in good time for my flight to the next stop: Melbourne.