Brisbane and surrounds

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We dragged ourselves off the beach and up the coast to Brisbane. This is the only place in Australia that we've found to have a traffic problem, its really busy!! W found a hostel that would let us park in there back yard so we were staying in the city centre. It was so hot when we arrived that we headed off to the South bank which is on the river, like in London, except that its famous for a Nepalese pagoda and a fake beach. We headed for the fake beach, which actually does have sand, to lie in the water and cool down. After we had been ther half an hour or so we bumped into Jason who was a freind of ours from the volunteer programme in Borneo, how random is that? We spent the afternoon chatting with him and then met up later for dinner and drinkies....The next day we checked out Brisbane museum and then finally went to watch Australia (the movie that is!)..

After 2 days in the expensive city we were itching to get back on the road so we headed up north a bit further to Australia zoo. It really is amazing there. We saw the crocaseum and a tiger show etc but the wildlife there is in amazing condition. There are loads of water dragons just wandering around and some of the enclosures especially in the wetlands section don't contain the birds etc, they are free to roam around. The zoo has a really strong conservation message but is still really good fun. The tigers were great jumping in and out of the water with there toys, we liked then the best..

After all this excitement we headed further up the sunshine coast to find a beach. It was dark by the time we arrived so we slept hoping to wake up and relax on the beach. Sadly, the weather has taken a turn for the worse here (that'll teach me to moan about being hot!) and its been chucking it down for the past couple of days so we have been planning our future and doing a lot of reading in the van! Steve has been braving it outside to cook noodles but it is very wet!! We are on our way down to Sydney now and next week we fy to NZ which is gonna be great!!

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