Brisbane

---

Today we got up and changed hostel - nothing wrong with where we were it was just I didn't fit into the bunk beds in the dorms and they couldn't let us stay in the private room with king bed any longer as they had no availability.

So we are now in the Price Consort - which is quite a cool building from the outside - kinda a big Western Saloon of the Gold Rush era. Quite a few of the historical buildings in Brisbane look like this or come from the same era.

Today was the day I was meant to go collect my new debit card from HSBC. I found out in Singapore that before I had left the UK the police had found my card details on a dodgy list which had left me comprimised. Sounds kinky eh.

The closest HSBC - there are only 13 in Oz was going to be Brsibane - so back in Singapore 3 weeks ago we instructed them to send it here. Of course HSBC being the totally useless world's local bank that they are don't have it and don't know where it is. Compounding my annoyance is the fact that you can only call the UK Call Centre (which is in India therefore closer to our time zone any bloody way) between 8am and 10pm GMT. Totally useless. None of the HSBC's we have been into seem to be able to communicate with one another!

So we spent the day trundling round Brisbane, aquanting ourselves with the city and planning the next few days. I don't know if we are the same as other backpackers but we seem to prefer to get to a decent sized City or Town and spend a day checking out the best trips, rather than racing from one place to the next and missing stuff.

We have had to miss a bit out though - we have jumped over the Whitsundays and today we decided not to bother going back up to Fraser Island. It is a good 4 hour drive north of Brisbane, and we have discoveered 2 great alternatives just off the Brissy coast - Moreton Island and North Stradbroke Island. We have certain things we wanted to do on Fraser - and these 2 islands accomodate them.

We also had a walk around the shopping area, arts district and over the river. Strangely on a map the Brisbane River resembles the section of the Thames on the Eastenders intro sequence! We found the Castlemaine XXXX brewery and Suncorp Stadium - Robbie Williams is here for the next couple of days.

One thing we forgot to mention - Queensland has loads of Ant's! Big, small, Black, Green, Red bloody allsorts! Thankfully no Mozzies though - so many people made a fuss in Malaysia and Singapore about the Mozzies in QLD, but we haven't seen hardly any - they are working really hard to eradicate them here to stop Dengue Fever.

---