A River Runs Through It

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The start of a new little adventure, this time to Queensland. I was planning on coming over here around August and doing both the Brisbane and Cairns areas but it started to get a bit stretched out, so I made a bit of a last minute decision to split it into two shorter trips, the first for twelve days to Brisbane, primarily for the Lamington National Park, and the second to Cairns for maybe three weeks, primarily for the Daintree and Atherton Tablelands (that'll be in August).

So here I am, in Brisbane (which has a river running through it, funny that), its sixteen degrees and its raining. My Airport Bird (the first bird seen from the plane) was a white-faced heron. I didn't really do much on the first day but rather depressingly I still managed to spend $318. But that was because I paid for all my accommodation in Brisbane for the next few days, the transport to Lamington, and all the camping fees there, which is most of my costs for the trip already taken care of so that's all right. The only things I have to spend money on now are food and the buses and trains to get to a few nearby places.

After all the initial spending was over I went to the Queensland Museum which is free. It is a very good museum with lots of stuffed animals. The "Museum Zoo" exhibition is an entire hall just packed with dead creatures while on the wall are lifesize outlines of such superlative representatives of the animal kingdom as Carcharocles megalodon, Meganeura, Architeuthis, Tyrannosaurus, Archelon, Harpagornis and Quetzalcoatlus (and every other monster beast you can probably think of). Outside the museum is the "Dinosaur Garden", a rather grand name for two lifesize dinosaur statues, a Triceratops and a Tyrannosaurus.

Then I went off to the Botanic Gardens which are quite small and lawny but have a mangrove boardwalk which is different.

The next day, today (Thursday), I took a train trip to the Boondall Wetlands. I only knew what station to get off at, rather than having any actual directions on how to get to the Wetlands so I never found them, and the guy at the station's ticket office was a moron so he was no help, so instead I wandered round for a few hours in the grounds of the Boondall Entertainment Centre, which appears to be a sort of indoor sports stadium but is surrounded by foresty sort of habitat and a few lakes. My favourite bird of the day was the darter or snakebird, like a cormorant but with a spear-like bill. Other nice birds there were osprey, Brahminy kite, spangled drongo, and the teeny tiny scarlet honeyeater.

After that it was up to the top of Mt. Coot-tha on the outskirts of the city. There's a bus that goes right up there so that's handy. The bush up there is really nice, all eucalyptusy, but it was raining most of the time so there weren't many birds out and about except for the noisy miners which are everywhere all the time. Its kinda funny watching people arrive at the lookout at the Mt. Coot-tha summit. They pull up in their buses or cars, wander up to the platform for a couple of minutes to view Brisbane from above, then head straight back to their vehicles and away. Granted there is actually nothing else to do there unless you like bush-walking or want a cup of coffee at the cafe there, but its still funny to see.

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Comments

[Peter Ericsson]

mountain peaks
I don't recall if you visited Doi Inthanon or not? It is simply like watching a theatric play to watch the local tourists come up to the Summit in their odd 'winter robes' ranging from the latest fashion wear, to rugs, towels, mittens and whatnot. Camera comes out, shouting and yelling, a cup of coffee and back down!

[Scary Israel]

I did visit Doi Inthanon, but when I was at the summit it was too early for other tourists :-)

[rfa]

65jaar
cool