The City Of Brisbane

---

Arrival

The bus journey from Surfers to Brisbane was relatively quick, mainly because we slept like babies. We were soon stretching our aching muscles at the Brisbane Transit Centre in the warm Queensland evening.

We had phoned up and booked a cheap deal with Brisbane City Backpackers, a central hostel in, surprisingly enough, the city of Brisbane. We stumbled about with the weight of our bags up to the hostel using rough directions from the Scottish receptionist, who oddly enough knew another Gary Stewart from Scotland that was in Australia.

We checked into our 8 bed dorm which was pretty nice, but loud! The hostel had a faux Irish bar literally beside our room and the noise was perpetual. The morning and evening barbeques were nice, but the place seemed to be trying really hard to be a "party" hostel, probably eager to pick up all the Oz Experience crew. It was a pretty nice hostel and we set about getting various electrical items charged and other household chores like laundry.

A Day In The Life

The next morning, we headed into the Brisbane CBD to use the internet and to have a little nosey about the city itself. It was exceptionally hot, which is bizarre considering they are just approaching winter. We had a browse of the Lonely Planet to check out things to do as well, but most of the things you could do there were either similar to things we had done in Sydney or not particularly exciting. Seemed like a really nice city though and it was nice to chill out here before heading on the rest of our whirlwind tour.

We headed down the shopping precincts and to the Story Bridge, another bridge designed by the guy who did the Sydney Harbour Bridge. You could also climb this one incidentally; this bridge climb idea is a decent cash cow. We also wandered through the Botanic Gardens here and then eventually got a call from Megan & Stew, who had finished the surf camp and were heading our way. We met them and went looking for dinner and ended up in yet another faux Irish pub (a pub in Australia isn't a pub unless it masquerades as Irish). The food turned out to be cheap and extremely tasty much to our surprise and the pub had good happy hour prices. We imbibed a few drinks then headed to the hostel and imbibed a few more before turning into bed.

I ended up transmitting the cold to Stew, which I had been battling since leaving Sydney. He was none too impressed.

We didn't really do too much in Brisbane, but Emma is currently writing the blog for the zoo which we did the next day so we've just seperated these entries to keep it a bit neater.

---