Brissy Brissy Brisbane

Its always quite cool heading into a Big City that you've heard and started thinking about from a thousand kilometres down the coast, you arrive and see the suburbs mounting up and getting more and more less randomly dotted and sparsely placed. It means you get to the centre to see the highrises and massive scaled buildings almost prepared! I remeber the same sort of thing happening when I got to Sydney and me being almost nervous of what there was, what I'd see and who I'd meet; the sheer scale of a big citymakes it quite an intimidating place to enter and get chucked into the middle.

Of course a quick look at the map familiarises yourself with the layout of such a place and disapates any feeling of being out of your depth, and you can start enjoying the place.

An old travelling face from Byron, Jack was there waiting for us - he was in the area and bored, aparently. After hitching a ride back to our hostel on the courtesy mini-bus, we ventured out and about, getting our bearings and what not, getting a general image of the place. Just wandering.

My remaining image of Brisbane is that of a small metropolitan Sydney combined with the aged buildings seen in London and some of the artiness of Melbourne. It seemed to be a place I could love, eventually.

Jack suggested we walk to 'the Beach'. Alright I thought, this could be a suprise, what with Brisbane being at least 20km from the sea, and the Brisbane River being similar to the Thames in look and size.

15 mins later and we were at a tiny man made beach which ran into a 20m kidney shaped swimming pool that it continuially surrounded. This was the beach for 1.8m people. Niiiiice. Never went in there for a dip, unsuprisingly.

Our hostel, 'Bunk' was the nicest big hostel I'd been in. everyone had a partition for a little bit of brivacy in bed as well as a light, shelf and plug socket. Every room, which housed 8 people, had a separate loo and shower, too. Every floor was diferently designed with a different theme - we we level 3 - Fire, which was dressed in reds and A level - standard paintings and art.

Downstairs was a bar that we got free entry into and cheap Jugs of beer ($8 for 1125ml - about 2 quid for a pint) which was an easy way to buy a round. Also had a pool table (free with the magic cotton bud coin slot jiggle...), heaters and a funky name - Birdee Num Nums. I think I only ever went here - everywhere else was charging actual money to get in. Being 'the' entertainment district, Fortitude Valley (strange, as it was on a hill), this was a bit disapointing.

Got my mobile phone back the next day from the Post Restante, finally. I'd been without it for at least a month, and I didn't miss it one bit. When I'd torn it out of the 4 layers of packaging (the number of places its had been chasing me through), and immediately felt it's wieght in my pocket - I'd survived without for a month, now it was weighing me down!! It did just what Facebook and Phoneboxes did, only faster and more expensive.

Lea ze German from Port Macquarie and Byron suggested this a good hostel (she was cleaning the kitchen at night for free accomodation), so we met up with her in the reception the next day to go to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary, which our nice hostel kindly drove us to (but not back).

Pretty cool place, nice and 'hands on' - I managed to poke a koala (very soft yet muscular), taunt 3 pigs (Bacon bacon bacon!!), and harass kangaroos that really couldn't care about the whole thing. There was also a cow in a pen labelled "WARNING: These pigs may bite." Funny also becuse it was a dozy little Cow-let (bigger than a calf, yet smaller than a real cow) that wouldn't hurt anything.

Doing some budgetting later, I realised I reeaaaaally don't have to work in Oz! WOOO! So long as I keep on the homecooked pasta and keep beer to a near minimum I can still actually afford to do cool stuff and maybe go home with some money to keep for whatever Uni needs.

I had also come to the point where I had only 2 months left in Oz. Looking back its hard to see where all the time's gone, but think logically and I can see it's just cuz I've been doing so many cool things and having such a brilliant time. To do this trip has easily been the best decision of my life, and I bet I'll come back a right backpacker bore - "...Yeah, when I was trekking the mountains of the Great Dividing range west of Sydney..." - I need to remember that not everyone reeeeeally wants to hear everything I've done. Its all about the anecdotes, I suppose. They're interesting, mostly.

Back to reality, Oliver and me wanted to go to see an Ozzie Rules Footy match. Aparently they weren't in season, so we made do with a Rugby Union game (I think it's Union... it had scrums in it...???).

After getting a bus outside our hostel that handily dropped us about 100 metres from the Suncorp Stadium, we got our tickets and I thought I was over dressed in the only shirt I had. My excuse is that it was the only thing I had to wear, which was true, I've got about 2 weeks of clothes (5 t's?) and I was on day 12 of the cycle.

Wow, how much lights and big TVs and stuff do they need? It was quite a sight, having never been to a stadium for a sporting event, only for music, which is a different lighting set up and totally different vibe altogether.

After foolishly saying 'who are the All Blacks' a bit too loudly and being shusshhhhed by Ollie, the game kicked off. The first thing I noticed was the lack of comentary! HAving only seen these sort of large scale sport matches on TV, I expected a lofty voice to be there, but no! I had to figure out what the hell was going on all by my self with Ollie.

My team were winning throughout 70 of the 80 minuites - we'd Rock-Paper-Scissored for it, though I won, my team lost in the last 10 mins; 28 to 21 or something. One hilight of the match was a little guy on a small quadbike burning it inbetween the players everytime 'The Queensland Reds' scored against 'The Crusaders' from NZ. It was just so random and seemingly unrelated to the game; this green kid with a company name plastered to a flag on the back going around at 15mph. The Reds weren't green, so it was an odd colour choice.

I got into it by the end - I reckon I'd get it if I watched another match. It was cooool! Not bad seats for $33, either.

We walked it back to the hostel after the match because the public transport was rammed. Only took us 15mins 'n all.

We went around the usual sights with Matheus, our friendly yet wierd German room mate, who stood at 6'7" tall, making Ollie (6'4") and myself seem miniscule. He wasn't lanky either, and weighed 125kgs, aparently!! He was an odd guy - his weight came in useful in Sydney when he became a horse trainer - breaking in young horses and training them. He also had the job of collecting horse semen, too, which he said was very dangerous, when 'ze man iz in ze heet of ze mooment and he's waving it allll over ze place - you gahta get him off the girl and get his juices man!' Niiiice. He also had a full hunting lisence, about 10 guns and really liked shotguns. And he;d killed a 5ft, 150kg pig with his knife. Interesting guy, but didn't really understand subtletly - openly gawking at good looking ladies as they walked by, peeking through the seat back and all. Oh yeah, he was also coughing because he'd inhaled salt water at 30m on his Advanced Diving PADI course. The prescribed drugs caused him to sleep most of the day and wake up either on a high or massively stoned; you could put speakers by his sleeping head and he wouldn't have woken up.

On one of the last nights, we won a free meal for having the best name in a quiz that we lost. Rather we were the only ones to scream our team's name (McLovin - a reference to the film 'Super Bad' which I'd seen before, and also given that to Ollie on our Nimbin tour as a surname before I knew it was Parke). It was very unsatisfying, spliting a free meal 2 ways; it was a nice rice and beef curry while it lasted though.

Brisbane as a whole was a cool place, though it didn't really have much going for it from a tourist's point of view. Recon I could live there though, its a more chilled out place than other cities I'd been to.

After 2 stops in larger places, I was looking forward to the next stop of Noosa - a small town of only backpackers and millionnaires; an interesting combo!