After days in laid back coastal villages we get to Brisbane, which is the Melbourne’s first competitor on what concerns art and culture. With our backpacks getting heavier and heavier at every stop, we slowly make our way from the bus station to Chinatown and “Prince Consort” backpackers hostel. So much for the name, the hostel is pretty questionable. No window in the room. A DVD player but no TV! We can just stare at it thinking which nice movies we could have watched. The common kitchen seems to run by “clean before use” (not after). But the city has plenty to offer and a little bit of sun helps us appreciate Brisbane even more. The city is developed along the Brisbane river with nice bridges, a zig-zagging water taxi running up and down, and a fake beach to make it look as fancy as possible. On one side of the river the cultural center features plenty of museums, a theater and an entertainment complex. Nice coffee places and restaurants round off the river front. It’s a nice place to be, where you can bike or run to work along city parks or even the mangrove forest!
The second day we hop on a bus to visit the Lone Pine sanctuary, about 40 minutes outside the city, here we hope to see koalas and kangaroos up close.
The place has lots of other animals as well, it’s extremely well kept and looks very natural. I just didn’t expect to be able to touch the kangaroos with my own hands! I expected them to be sort of aggressive, not friendly at all. Instead it is an incredible experience, they are amazing, soft like rabbits and cute like cats. They move on their huge back legs in the funniest way, and really JUMP fast! While Andreas gets lost as a little kid in the sanctuary, I watch the sheep and dogs show, and as much as I love dogs and think some of them are very intelligent, I feel once again surprised by how elegantly the dogs can guide the sheep wherever they want. Or maybe it’s just the sheep which aren’t so smart after all…
I loved the day at the sanctuary!
Just 80Km south of Brisbane we reach the party town of Surfers paradise, which as the name suggests is supposed to be great fun for surfers. This place looks just like Miami Beach, lots of skyscrapers, unnecessary luxury, people overdressed in designer clothes and an amazingly long beach. The weather is back to overcast and windy, but we book the whale watching since it seems to be running for the next days. The waves are not so easy to surf, but some experts are still out there to make their day and we just sit and relax on the fine sands looking at them for a while. The expectation for the whale watching is growing until I get a phone call saying that due to weather conditions the cruise is off.
That put us down enough, but nothing that a good Irish stew cannot fix! So we are off to the pub for greasy ribs, stew and a couple of ales. Having underestimated the length of Australia we cut down our bus trip to Coolangatta, where we’ll catch a flight to Sydney, this should save us something like 14 hours on the road! So we’ll spend our last night in romantic Cooly, where we get a beautiful sunset on the Gold Coast, overlooking at the skyline of Surfers Paradise. If they didn’t feed me the driest muffin I’ve ever eaten, it would be one of my favorite places!
Off to Sydney!