Brisbane People & Culture

This is my least favourite Australian city. Unless you're a beach bum there's not a huge amount to do, the people are really slobby and they have one season year round.

I lived in Brisbane for 6 months and fell in love with city and the people...There is always something to do if you're interested! Stroll down Queen street mall and look and the different shops, walk the waterfront and relax, take the city cat around the river...

I moved here in 2007 in order to study abroad. Brisbane is quite a big city if you take into account its suberbs and it is not far at all from the Gold Coast which offers some of the best beaches in the world. The climate here is really good and the people are very friendly.

Our time on the Gold Coast went quickly, and we didn't really have much time to do more than see Wet N' Wild and DreamWorld before heading onward. Every time we returned to our hostel, it seemed as though someone was heading out to a party with a crate of beer, but we just wanted to relax for a few days before heading further north towards the rainforests of northern Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef. Before that, however, I had booked a couple of nights stopover in Brisbane. On my previous trip in 1998, I really hadn't seen much more of the city than the inside of the transit centre, and ever since people had been keen to tell me what I'd been missing. To be honest, I wasn't expecting too much as my experience of Australian cities other than Sydney and Perth are that they tend to be nowhere near on the scale of cities back home and not exactly hubs of activity - but I was more than willing to be proved wrong. As I often am. As you drive into Brisbane and follow a line of coaches up a dreary looking circular ramp into the Transit Centre, it's easy to wake up after a long journey, look out of the window at the featureless grey walls passing by and draw a hasty conclusion, as I did, that you're entering just another dismal city of square office blocks and grid-system roads. The Brisbane Transit Centre, which is about as much as I managed to see of the city the last time I was here, appears on arrival to be a multi-storey car park for coaches with a split level lounge and waiting area placed on top as an afterthought - from the outside, it certainly isn't designed to give the impression of a gateway into a vibrant modern city. Once you disembark from your coach and go inside, however, it suddenly seems as though you might have to think again. The centre comprises almost an entire city block and the lounge provides everything a tired traveller could possibly want while waiting for a connection - shops, fast food restaurants, an internet cafe, arcade machines, rest areas and televisions. In fact, if you travel down on the escalator below the two waiting levels, you'll find an entire food court and shopping centre. Anyone familiar with dingy coach stations elsewhere would almost certainly be slightly taken aback by the Brisbane Transit Centre - it's more like an airport than a glorified bus stop, complete with a separate level for arrivals and departures, monitors hanging from the ceiling with estimated times for all incoming and outgoing coaches, and ongoing announcements telling you when your coach is ready for boarding and through which gate you should go to find it! Believe it or not, you're even expected to check your bags in on arrival and have them weighed. Presumably, this is to make sure that the coach doesn't suddenly tip over at high speed through the combined weight of luggage in the hold - something which we all know is a real problem everywhere else in the world. There's that sarcasm again, did you get that? Only after your luggage has been checked, ticketed and taken away from you, and you've been subjected to questions about whether or not you packed your bags yourself as though you're getting on an international flight wearing a Tee-Shirt on which is written "Terrorists do it at 30,000 feet",can you think about going and getting a cup of tea and waiting for your, um, flight to be called. It's all quite surreal, terribly bureaucratic, and almost certainly totally un-necessary. It does, however, add something to the whole travelling experience in Australia. Also, of course, some people might miss the opportunity to give somebody a chance to lose their luggage for them, and at least this way you don't actually get to see your bags being loaded onto the bus. Adds to the excitement! It was fairly late when we arrived, and after collecting our bags we stopped for a bite to eat from the food court. There really wasn't much open at that time of night and the people serving at the remaining fast food outlets really didn't look as though they wanted to be there. Tanya, being a vegetarian, got to pig out on something delicious from the veggie stand while I, unfortunately, had to be served by the only person remaining at Kentucky Fried Chicken who was doubling as cashier and chef and was clearly unfamiliar with the art of cooking a chicken so that it didn't taste like a sock. Then, with Tanya going on about how full she was and me mumbling under my breath about humane methods of execution for fast food chefs, we set about trying to locate our hotel. As we were essentially just passing through on our way north, I had booked us into somewhere which looked as though it would be comfortable for a couple of days rather than being particularly over the top. Nevertheless, it turned out that we were staying just about opposite the City Botanical Gardens and only a couple of blocks from the shopping district - so we didn't have far to go to get to anything. Our hotel, in fact, turned out to be better than I had been expecting and was clearly meant for people passing through on business - it even came with free broadband internet access in the room. We had a separate bedroom and living area, and a distant view of the river over the Botanical gardens from our window. After our brief dabble into the youth hostel experience in Surfers Paradise, we had clearly gone up market again. Nevertheless, we had limited time in Brisbane so we just threw our suitcases in a corner and went to bed in order to get an early start in the morning exploring the city. The central pedestrian mall on the junctions of Queen Street and Albert Streetis the main shopping destination for Brisbanites.The city does a fairly good job of pretending to be a lot smaller than it is, and since we were staying quite close to the Queen Street Mall and spent most of our time in the general area, I actually came away with the impression that Brisbane isn't much more than a few relaxed city blocks containing a pleasant community square, the mall and the botanic gardens. Obviously, we didn't have a long stay in which to explore further, but it's only after getting home and looking on a map that I realise just how sprawling Brisbane and its suburbs really are. This small town illusion isn't a bad thing by any means, and is a good indication of just how "cosy" Australians manage to make their cities feel. Whereas Britain tends to cover its cities in concrete and ugly grey office blocks stretching up to the sky, and seems to love employing architects who seriously believe a building shaped like an aubergine to be a fantastic idea, Australia still very much goes for large open community spaces, lots of greenery and parkland, and long relaxing walks between different shopping areas. Of course, Australians do have a tendency to use the word "city"in the same way Americans do - referring to just about everything larger than a small car park - but Brisbane actually manages to be a well spread out metropolis and home to nearly two million people without actually giving the feel to a visitor of being more than a small community. I applaud this, and very much wish London was the same. One of the most forward thinking innovations I saw in Brisbane while we were there was that the local government had installed free wireless internet hotspots around the Queen Street Mall. Anybody could just wander down to the shops with their laptop, sit on a bench anywhere along the street, and surf the internet. I don't suppose this is such a radical thing now that everybody has broadband at home and at the office - why would you take your laptop down the street when you can stay at home or plug in at the office without wasting the batteries - but it's small ideas like this which other countries seem unwilling to adopt which set Australia apart. While we were out, we decided to buy a phone card from the kiosk at the junction of the two main streets on the Brisbane mall - mainly because we would need to start phoning ahead for accommodation at any moment and being able to use a payphone in the street was going to be slightly more convenient than spending much of our remaining budget calling from our hotel room. To this day, I have no idea whether somebody made a mistake, or whether phone cards in Australia are just extraordinarily good value - but we certainly weren't short changed. I settled on a five dollar card, since there were options from various telecoms companies and I thought it might be best to start with a low value, see how long the card lasted, and perhaps go for a card from a different company later in the search for the best value. Well, I needn't have worried - the first time I put the card in a payphone and keyed in the handy six thousand digit security code printed on the reverse, I was welcomed by an automated Australian voice which told me chirpingly: "You have seven hundred and eighty six minutes of call time remaining on this card." I fully appreciate that this was an estimate and that it was probably based on the assumption that I would be making mostly local calls, but even after several weeks of using the card to call ahead and book rooms, and phoning home a couple of times, I was still being greeted by a cheery Australian lady telling me that I had many hundreds of minutes left. I still have it somewhere, although I expect it's expired by now. The first time you use a British phone card, all you usually get is a voice laughing at you and asking sarcastically if you seriously expect to be able to make an entire phone call for the mere ten pounds you paid for it! My favourite destination in Brisbane is, by far, the City Botanical Gardens. Australia, as I have said previously, excels in maintaining its wide open spaces rather than covering them in office blocks, and seems to be just as good at maintaining them as genuine back to nature retreats in the midst of city life. Every major city in the country has a large area set aside as botanic gardens, and they are all justifiably proud of their own and keen to point out how much more spectacular they are than everyone else's! Now, I should point out here that neither Tanya or I are massive fans of the whole formal gardens thing - the idea that somebody has planted an area of grass several miles square and then dotted it with perfectly round flowerbeds connected with cute little cobbled paths seems to be a particularly British thing and rather makes us want to run screaming in the opposite direction. These places, it always seems to me whenever I'm forced to walk through one on my way somewhere, are mainly frequented by ladies in their eighties walking in pairs pointing at daffodils and saying "Oh look Mavis, isn't that lovely?" to each other at regular intervals. This is ironic as it's usually exactly these sorts of people who have trouble even getting out of bed in the morning without falling over, let alone being expected to walk around miles of labyrinthine pathways looking for pansies. I can't speak for Tanya, but personally my impression of city gardens was a bit clouded by this stereotype and I hadn't held up a lot of hope for the botanic gardens, so I have to say that I was very pleasantly surprised by the ones in Brisbane. I then went on to be even more pleasantly surprised to discover over the following weeks that the Australians seem to guard their natural habitats very closely and would generally rather have a pointed stick rammed up their bottom and be shot out of a cannon than allow anybody with a degree in architecture to go anywhere near them! The City Botanic Gardens aren't, by any means, the largest in Australia. However, this less sprawling layout makes it easier to find your way around and to use the gardens as a place to relax and spend the day without having to wander around with a seventy page guidebook trying to work out where to go next, as you do in some of the larger ones elsewhere. Entering from Alice Street, you find the sound of the city vanishing surprisingly quickly. A path leads off towards the central rotunda which clearly acts as a meeting point in the park, and to the right there is a large ornamental pond around which Ibis and Lizards wander looking for visitors to feed them. Of course, as in all these places, feeding the animals is not encouraged, but nevertheless people still crowd around the pond and sit on the surrounding benches handing out bread to anything which seems interested. Which is to say, every living creature in the park. I'd only just got through the gate, and already I felt as though I really wanted a place like this near to my home in England. The nearest thing I had in London at the time was a small featureless park with a small duck pond, usually filled with obnoxious teenagers (the park, not the pond - we haven't begun drowning our troublemakers yet) throwing litter on the grass, wiping their noses on their sleeves and saying "Innit" to each other at regular intervals for no apparent reason. I've since moved. As with most botanical gardens in Australia, the park is divided into themed areas through which visitors can experience flora and fauna from different regions of the country. For example, a stroll along the path to the north of the gardens allows you to surround yourself with giant strangler fig trees (also known, less dramatically, as the Banyan Fig). This scary looking species, more prevalent in northern Queensland, looks like something you might expect to find in a haunted forest or a horror movie. The trees usually start life as a result of a seed dropped by a bird which lodges itself in a small hole in the bark of another tree. The strangler then uses this tree as a host, growing its roots downward toward the soil below and winding them around the host until it has literally sucked all the nutrients out of it. Strangler figs are usually found in dark woodland like that of the rainforests in northern Queensland, where there is limited space for new trees to grow and sunlight is at a premium under the dense canopy - stranglers often end up as circles of branches around a hollow core, where the host tree has died and rotted away. They really are something spectacular to behold, and tourism companies will often take groups out to see the larger ones which really do look like something out of a fantasy world and just have to be seen to be believed. At the centre of the gardens is a single wooden post sticking out of the ground, atop which is a metal date marker which reads 1974. This is a flood mark which was erected in 1999 to commemorate the many floods which have devastated the region over the last two centuries, and in particular indicates the high point of the great flood of 1974 when the water rose to a height of four and a half meters, destroying many of the most prized areas of the gardens and closing them for over two months. Many of the palm trees around the gardens still lean quite noticeably from the force of the flood waters, and various attempts to right them using pulleys have failed. I say just leave them alone - let nature design its own look! Close by, a grove contains a collection of around twenty five species of bamboo and this commemorates the loss of one of the gardens best loved early attractions, Fern Island, a small island in a lagoon at the centre of the park which was reached by way of wooden foot bridges. The lagoon was reluctantly drained and filled, and Fern Island removed in 1937 as a result of increasing complaints from locals about the swarms of mosquitoes it drew in. It would seem as though the City Botanical Gardens are keen to remind us that nothing lasts forever. One of the last remaining features from the original gardens, in fact, is its famous Tamarind Tree. Planted in the mid-nineteenth century to provide food for early settlers, it still produces fruit to this day. One of the most attractive things about the City Botanical Gardens is the fact that they are located right on the river front, and this, in itself, would be something which would be likely to draw me to the Brisbane area were I ever to be looking to relocate to an Australian city. By making your way through the park and past the restaurant, you find the trees starting to close in and begin to enter an area which feels altogether more natural and less and less as though you're in the middle of a big city. A little further on, you come out onto the quite amazing mangrove boardwalk. Built along the river front but also under a dense canopy of trees so that you feel mostly hidden from the city and more as though you're on a river in the forest than in a place like Brisbane, the mangrove walk really is something quite unlike anything I've seen before in any garden or park of any kind. Suddenly, the sounds of people disappear behind you, the densely packed trees acting as a natural barrier to much of the noise from the surrounding area. The only sound, apart from the occasional footsteps of your fellow visitors, is that of insects and birds in the trees or wading in the mud between the mangroves. What makes the mangrove boardwalk in Brisbane so special is that no attempt seems to have been made to make it at all touristy. Along a large section of the river bank mud filled mangrove swamps are surrounded by dense woodland and vegetation, and wooden boardwalks zig-zag across its surface, held in place only by the suction of the mud beneath. It's as though somebody has lifted a section of mangrove swamp from beside a river in a tropical forest somewhere and dropped it in Brisbane, sticking the odd wooden pathway across it so people can pass through without sinking up to their shoulders in mud! Australians are well known for their love of ecology and maintaining a natural environment, so much so that it sometimes feels as though taking a photograph of an animal out in the bush might result in a policeman suddenly appearing from out of nowhere and carting you off to jail for disturbing it (This is true of Aborigines, by the way. If you take a photo of an Aborigine without asking first, and he doesn't like it, expect to spend some time behind bars. Pretty much the same thing applies if you take a rock home or disturb the environment of Australia in any way - such is the Australian's all-encompassing wish to leave everything and everyone undisturbed.) This attitude to the environment definitely shows itself here, where virtually no unnecessary tinkering is done with the mangrove swamps other than to maintain the boardwalk from time to time. Stopping along the route and peering over the railings at the mud below reveals a plethora of swamp life, from minute crabs scuttling over the surface to wading birds who really look as though they shouldn't be able to stand on the mud without sinking. This is the nearest many of us will get to exploring a full-sized mangrove swamp without flying somewhere that requires a lot of injections - and on the way home, you can walk back along the river bank at the edge of the gardens and see some of the last remaining Australian Blue Gum trees in the area. Always assuming, of course, that you can avoid being run over by the cyclists who like to use the river path as a raceway. Our stop in Brisbane had only been brief, but enjoyable. Our next port of call was much further north, in Cairns. On my previous trip, I had been fortunate enough to go SCUBA diving on the Great Barrier Reef amongst other things, and was looking forward to introducing Tanya to some of the same experiences. Our ultimate destination on the east coast was the rainforests of northern Queensland, where I had already booked a hotel in the heart of the forest, but first we had to use our new super-value phone card to call ahead and book somewhere to stay on arrival in Cairns as the courtesy bus to take us to our rainforest retreat wasn't due to pick us up for a couple of days. Suitcases in hand, we headed back to the Brisbane Transit Centre where we booked ourselves in and spent our last hour in the city wandering around the shops on the lower level and looking through our guide books for things to do in Cairns. This was going to be our longest coach trip yet...My complete travel journals are at www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and /globalwanderer2

The following year, Tanya and I returned to Brisbane as part of a more in-depth tour of Australia and New Zealand. This time, we had backpacks firmly strapped to our backs (always the best place to keep them) and were very much playing the student travel game, staying in youth hostels and backpacker accommodation nearly everywhere so we'd have more money to spend on seeing a wider range of places. Althoughwe had very limited time and were really just passing through again, this time we wanted to play the tourist game and see what there was to do in the way of days out in the area. The Transit Centre had a tour desk which was covered in colourful posters advertising local attractions, but unfortunately many of these either required the presence of small children or only seemed to run on the third Tuesday of every month when there was a Q in the year. The one thing which did grab our attention, however, was the opportunity to go whale watching at Hervey Bay. We had already tried to do the whole whale watch thing the previous year when we visited Kaikoura, a small town on the east coast of the South Island of New Zealand (more of that elsewhere), but had experienced only limited success due to the skies constantly opening up and the rough weather either threatening to capsize our boat or causing the worried staff at the whale watching place to cancel the trip entirely. It certainly isn't hard to find anybody willing to take you out to see the humpback whales at Hervey Bay. When Tanya and I arrived at the harbour front bright and early with our tour from Brisbane, it seemed as though the place was already packed with people arriving from all over to get on board any of the numerous boats moored along the front with fanciful names and pictures of whales and dolphins along the sides. In fact, the whole whale watch is so well established here that they've even got something called the "Whale Industry Association of Hervey Bay" just to make absolutely sure that nobody is ever expected to get up at the crack of dawn by somebody called Honest Bob, handed a bucket and forced to board a rickety looking boat with holes in it. Thanks to quite stringent regulation, the tours all seem to be run by people with many years experience in the business, who know exactly where to look for the whales in order to avoid disappointment. You can choose from tours at first light, tours at sundown, half day tours or full day tours. If you've got altogether too much money burning a hole in your pocket, for a mere twelve hundred dollars you can even book yourself onto a week long ecological expedition with the Oceana Project, a group who spend their lives out at sea studying whale and dolphin behaviour. Of course, not all boats and operators provide the same facilities, so you need to do some research ahead of time and find out exactly what comes with your trip - I am slightly disappointed, for example, to discover since returning to England that some whale watch companies have installed underwater sound systems on their boats so that guests can actually listen to the whale song when the humpbacks are below the surface out of sight. The whale watch in Hervey Bay offers guaranteed whale sightings, as did Kaikoura the previous year. In reality, however, what this actually means is that they'll take everybody out again on a free trip if they don't see anything the first time - it's not as though they'll just leave you moored out in the middle of the ocean for twelve days until something comes along or anything. This sounds great in theory, but of course it isn't much compensation if you're only passing through and simply don't have the time to go on your free trip. This is the one thing which I would always advise anyone to remember when planning a whale watch: although the whales at Hervey Bay are more than used to these strange human creatures turning up on their doorstep and staring at them all day long, and are therefore not remotely bothered about coming right alongside the boat so that you can almost reach out and touch them, that doesn't mean they don't get shy from time to time. There is nothing more disappointing than travelling thousands of miles to see something which then simply doesn't feel like coming out today - so be warned. After our previous experience at Kaikoura, we were really hoping things would go more according to plan at Hervey Bay, and we weren't to be disappointed. In New Zealand, the weather really did put a bit of a damper on things, and although we did get to catch brief glimpses of whales when we finally got out to sea, it was still pouring with rain and what we did see was brief and distant - usually preceded by somebody shouting out "whale!", at which everybody would rush to the other side of the boat just in time to catch the splash from the giant tail as it started to settle on the water. Add to this the fact that the rain and rough seas prevented us from going outside, and all but the bravest sea dogs in our group were having to look out for the whales through small heavily misted glass windows from inside a warm lounge rather than the deck.To say that we had much more success at spotting these magnificent creatures in Hervey Bay, however, would be an understatement - and to think that I hadn't even previously been aware that whale watching was considered as big a deal in Australia as it is in New Zealand. One thing which I certainly learned from Hervey Bay was that it never pays to be a smart-arse. I can honestly say that, in all the years I've been travelling on boats, ships and ferries, I have never had any sort of problem with seasickness. Over the years I've been back and forth to Europe by sea, spent days at a time on short-haul cruises, happily hopped from island to island in Hong Kong and zoomed across the water on the back of a speedboat in Thailand - and, despite rolling around like a marble in a tin on many of those trips, I can say with my hand on my heart that, before Hervey Bay,I had never felt so much as a hiccup. Tanya, on the other hand, has a slight problem with balance, something which getting on board a fast-moving boat on rough seas wasn't going to help - and, although the sky was clear and the weather pleasant, the wind was strong and the sea at Hervey Bay on the day of our whale watch had clearly decided that it was going to get progressively rougher as we got further into it. And in case you've been wondering, this is where the bit about me being a smart-arse comes in. Wanting to show what a loving, understanding boyfriend I was, I saw that Tanya was starting to feel a bit ill and suggested that she should sit inside the boat, at the front, and stare at a fixed point on the horizon - pretty standard advice given to people suffering from motion sickness of any kind. The crew was very helpful and understanding, providing lots of kind words of support and sick bags. Having done all they could to help, they then went about setting up a load of fold-out tables along the centre of the cabin and covering them with every type of snack, nibble or dip known to mankind, as well as large jugs of water and juice - something which very much proved to be my downfall. While it is true that sitting calmly in your seat and not rushing around like a lunatic is probably a good idea to avoid seasickness, dashing around a table loading food onto paper plates and fetching cups of water for your seasick girlfriend and then racing back and forth across a heaving deck to deliver them probably isn't - and within no time at all I was feeling sicker than a whole tree full of parrots. Within a matter of minutes, I had joined Tanya at the front of the boat and we were both sitting quietly and staring forlornlyinto the middle distance while holding on to seasickness bags.Believe me, there is much more to this anecdote, mainly involving the fact that the crew all went off to do something else and forgot to mention that the bags were only strong enough for one use - but I firmly believe that exploding sick bag stories should only be told to peoplethat you really don't like. Suffice to say that neither of us were feeling very well when we got to the area where all the whales were, but we soon forgot how ill we were when the boat slowed down and we saw how many humpbacks were waiting for us! The crew, however, didn't get to see any of it as they were too busy searching for mops and buckets and placing orders for stronger sick bags... The whales swimming the waters near Hervey Bay are Humpbacks, and they are frequent visitors especially during the months of July to November. This is because the Humpback Whale migrates from the southern oceans of the Antarctic each year in order to head for warmer waters for calving before returning to the Antarctic as winter rolls around. I think it would be safe to say that both Tanya and I were blown away by our whale watch expedition, and came away with huge smiles on our faces. The Humpbacks didn't seem at all worried about the proximity of various boatloads of tourists all around them, and we even ended up getting up close and personal to a mother and calf, which was something pretty close to being the most amazing experience of my life.Both whales seemed totally relaxed around us, although the calf didn't stray far from its mother - we all crowded along the side of the boat and watched them appearing to play together in the water, the sight of the calf projecting almost its entire length out of the water right next to the dark island of its half submerged parent being far more than I think any of us had been expecting. The captain and crew of our boat seemed to be extremely knowledgeable, and not only did they seem to know exactly where the whales would be at any time, but the captain was clearly in constant radio contact with other vessels and would head off as soon as anybody radioed him that something was going on elsewhere. I don't know where some people get the idea that whales come to the surface once in a blue moon, spend quite a lengthy amount of time there and then vanish below the sea again for hours on end until they need to take another breath. Clearly, the humpbacks in Hervey Bay take great pleasure in spending much of their time breaching, taking great leaps out of the water, performing all sorts of acrobatic stunts and slapping their sides as though somebody has just told them a really good joke. Many people come thousands of miles just to capture on film the moment when, having spent enough time having fun on the surface, a whale will momentarily appear to vanish below the waves before its massive tail appears once more, rises into the air and then creates a mighty splash as it finally hits the water and follows its owner into the depths. This is notoriously one of the hardest moments to capture on film, and yet once you know that the great arched back sinking out of sight is an indication to have your camera ready, you're pretty much sorted. Unfortunately, of course, this is usually also the moment that fifty people all charge towards the side of the boat with cameras in hand and you find yourself being trampled underfoot, ending up with lots of photos of frantically waving arms and other people's backsides. Luckily, we had both a camera and video with us on this trip and I spent my time snapping away while Tanya tried very hard to hold the video as steadily as possible while keeping the whales in shot. Unfortunately, the wind seemed to have a disconcerting habit of waiting until the very moment that one of the whales would make some sort of acrobatic leap from the water before causing the boat to lurch suddenly to one side with just enough force to ensure that we got some impressive footage of a large portion of sky rather than anything remotely interesting. I'm really glad we had more than just a camera, though, because the videofootage we did get really is something special - no still photograph can truly capture the excitement of people screaming with delight as whales burst out of the water in front of you again and again. There is, however, a wonderful piece of comedy on the video where Tanya can quite clearly be heard going "Oooh" and "Wow, look at that" while the captain is enthusing in the background about what an amazing thing we've just seen and how you don't get to see that sort of thing very often - this is all accompanied by a totally black screen followed by Tanya complaining to me that I really should remind her to remove the lens cap! The captain, for somebody who obviously does this trip every day, seemed so genuinely excited about everything we were seeing from the start that it would've been easy to believe that he'd never seen a whale before in his life. This seems to be a typically Australian thing: many people you meet come across as constantly hyper and delightfully surprised by everything going on around them. Their wonderful habit (or a habit which makes you want to slap them, depending on who you talk to) of raising the inflection in their voice at the end of every sentence so that everything sounds like a question, is probably best explained by this apparent wonder at everything they see in the world around them. Throughout our whale encounter, the captain's voice can be heard on the soundtrack getting higher and higher with excitement until he's virtually breathless: "They're gonna come right up to the side of the boat guys... this is an awesome encounter... wave and shout guys, give them some visual stimulus... oh my god... look at the calf, he's really showing off, he's saying "here I am guys"... he's head lunging his way across the water, following his mum... this is awesome guys..." Because of this rather hyper behaviour, and the Australian love of practical jokes, it was hard to know whether to take the captain seriously when he suggested that we should make as much noise as possible, wave and shout and generally make ourselves known to the whales - this would bring them over to investigate, he said. This, of course, flies in the face of established rules regarding not disturbing the wildlife - going out into a forest and trying to attract deer by screaming and shouting and firing flares into the air probably wouldn't be very successful and would almost certainly really piss off every conservationist on the planet. Nevertheless, as we got closer to the whales, everybody crowded along the side of the boat and the air was quickly full of deafening whistles, people shouting at the top of their lungs, and children yelling "Over here, Mr Whale" - and it seemed to work. Within a matter of seconds, the whales were coming right alongside the boat, the calf following close behind his mother to see what all the fuss was about. It really is a shame that we haven't yet invented books with moving pictures like the ones in Harry Potter - if this isn't a prime example of when a still photograph just can't do enough justice, I don't know what is! Humpbacks are naturally inquisitive and don't seem to mind getting up close and personal with humans, a fact which has no doubt contributed to them becoming one of the most endangered whale species in the world with only five thousand remaining in the entire southern hemisphere. To see mother and baby swimming together and know that they are now a protected species gives me hope that the decline in numbers will slow and future generations visiting the whale watch at Hervey Bay will be able to see many more whales enjoying the waters off the east coast of Australia. Back in Brisbane, Tanya and I were staying at the City Backpackers on Upper Roma Street, and it must be a testament to exactly how little time we spent there that I only recognise about two photographs on their website when I look at it today. Where was that huge swimming pool they show off in the pictures exactly? Anyway, wherever they were hiding the facilities, the place was about as large as I've come to expect from an Australian backpackers. As I've said before, this is one country which certainly doesn't treat travellers as though they are somehow inferior just because they happen to have their luggage strapped to their back - in many ways, it sometimes seems as though backpackers actually get a better level of service in many places! We actually stayed at the city backpackers twice, once on the way out and once on the way back, and on both occasions we had no problem at all in getting a private room as we had in Surfers Paradise the previous year - we had a small bathroom of our own which was just large enough to contain the sink, and we had to share a communal shower with everybody else in the block, but sacrificing some of the luxuries meant that we had more to spend on travelling between places. One thing I did find particularly of note about the City Backpackers was that it actually had its very own pub - The Fiddlers Elbow - which was in full swing having a party for somebody's birthday when we arrived on our first night. I have to say that thisis definitely pandering to the customers - there's usually more than one pub within staggering distance of any hostel, but I believe this is the only time I've actually seen one on the premises! One of the things our fellow travellers were keen to tell us was that you really don't want to put anything down in the kitchen for more then five seconds if you want to see it again - it seems there'll always be somebody who just needs to "borrow" a fork and will forget to give it back afterwards, sometimes resulting in hour long and totally riveting "It's my fork", "No it's not, it's my fork" discussions over lunch. This was evidenced by the incredible difficulty I had convincing reception to lend me a can opener - they would only hand it out if I signed for it and brought it back as soon as I'd finished with it. I returned to the kitchen where Tanya was waiting, opened our can of baked beans (1), turned around to make a cup of tea and turned back to find that the can opener had mysteriously sprouted legs and gone off on a walkabout. After a slightly mad panic anda couple of hours, we eventually traced the wandering utensil, but not until it had changed hands at least half a dozen times and made its way around the hostel twice. The rule seems to be: if you want to keep it, label it. I still mean to return to Brisbane one day and spend more time in the area. On every occasion I've visited so far, I've just been passing through or have had little time to do anything. The city strikes me as a great place to explore in more detail, especially as it seems remarkably laid back. On our one trip through King George Square on the way to our hostel, Tanya and I discovered crowds of people standing around between the statues admiring a giant sleeping dragon sculpted out of sand and laying in an oversized sand pit. I really wish I had a clue what that was all about! (1) You would simply not believe how hard it was to get hold of normal, un-mucked-about-with baked beans in tomato sauce in Australia or New Zealand. Sure, I've heard people say that Britain is about the only place where baked beans are really eaten, but this was Australia and there really isn't a hell of a lot of difference in the dietary habits over there. Nevertheless, finding a can of ordinary baked beans in an Aussie or New Zealand supermarket seemed almost like trying to find a mini-skirt shop in the middle-east. One thing they did have in abundance, however, was cans of baked beans in a cheese sauce - mainly marketed by a company called Watties, which is what Heinz have evidently decided to call themselves down under, particularly in New Zealand, just to confuse visitors. After giving up on trying to find the normal stuff, we finally decided to try the cheese sauce variant and found it to be virtually identical to the tomato sauce version - which is particularly strange as I don't like cheese, which shows you how much cheese flavour they must have. I tried to do some research into this for this book, but found nothing on the internet but people ranting on about how much Australians love baked beans in tomato sauce. So we were obviously looking in the wrong place for a month. And no, you're not going mad - the entire last sentence really was about baked beans. Sometimes, I just don't know when to stop ranting on about stuff.My complete travel journals can be found at www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and /globalwanderer2

Bris Vegas - get on the city cat and cruise the river from one end to the other.  The Gallery of Modern Art and the Arts Complex is the best in Australia, walk around South bank and City beach. Take a drive up to Mt Cootha and view the city and surrounds and have Devonshire tea and gelato, walk the curvy streets from Red Hill to Paddington for art, fashion and culture.  Go to the Saturday Riverside markets and the Sunday markets in the Valley and hang out in the street cafes, have the best Vietnamese food in West End and stay on to party, and finish up with a cold beer at the Regatta Hotel in Toowong before heading to the Gold/Sunshine coasts.  Enjoy this fabulous city, it is hot, hot, hot!!!  

Groove Train, on the river at 123 Eagle Street, make fabulous woodfired pizza, and the soup of the day is usually to die for as well.

Very retro, lots of comfy seats, good music and river views, its located at the riverside jetty. Most mains average between A$15-22 dollars, some are a little more, some a little less. But you can feed yourself comfortably for $20, and they do doggy bags - in case you don't finish the really big servings they give you.

Brisbane - the capital city of Sunshine Coast-Queensland Popular place - Warner Bros.Movie World!!! - U can cuddle with Looney Tunes charaters - Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety, Lala, Tazzie Devil Sylvester.... Gold Coast - Dream World !!! Dance sing at Wiggles World with all The Wiggles Friends.

take the road out to sea world and just before you get to the 1st round about there is the best fresh fish shop in the whole of BNE (brisbane) also its very well priced.

I moved here in 2007 in order to study abroad. Brisbane is quite a big city if you take into account its suberbs and it is not far at all from the Gold Coast which offers some of the best beaches in the world. The climate here is really good and the people are very friendly.

Our time on the Gold Coast went quickly, and we didn't really have much time to do more than see Wet N' Wild and DreamWorld before heading onward. Every time we returned to our hostel, it seemed as though someone was heading out to a party with a crate of beer, but we just wanted to relax for a few days before heading further north towards the rainforests of northern Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef. Before that, however, I had booked a couple of nights stopover in Brisbane. On my previous trip in 1998, I really hadn't seen much more of the city than the inside of the transit centre, and ever since people had been keen to tell me what I'd been missing. To be honest, I wasn't expecting too much as my experience of Australian cities other than Sydney and Perth are that they tend to be nowhere near on the scale of cities back home and not exactly hubs of activity - but I was more than willing to be proved wrong. As I often am. As you drive into Brisbane and follow a line of coaches up a dreary looking circular ramp into the Transit Centre, it's easy to wake up after a long journey, look out of the window at the featureless grey walls passing by and draw a hasty conclusion, as I did, that you're entering just another dismal city of square office blocks and grid-system roads. The Brisbane Transit Centre, which is about as much as I managed to see of the city the last time I was here, appears on arrival to be a multi-storey car park for coaches with a split level lounge and waiting area placed on top as an afterthought - from the outside, it certainly isn't designed to give the impression of a gateway into a vibrant modern city. Once you disembark from your coach and go inside, however, it suddenly seems as though you might have to think again. The centre comprises almost an entire city block and the lounge provides everything a tired traveller could possibly want while waiting for a connection - shops, fast food restaurants, an internet cafe, arcade machines, rest areas and televisions. In fact, if you travel down on the escalator below the two waiting levels, you'll find an entire food court and shopping centre. Anyone familiar with dingy coach stations elsewhere would almost certainly be slightly taken aback by the Brisbane Transit Centre - it's more like an airport than a glorified bus stop, complete with a separate level for arrivals and departures, monitors hanging from the ceiling with estimated times for all incoming and outgoing coaches, and ongoing announcements telling you when your coach is ready for boarding and through which gate you should go to find it! Believe it or not, you're even expected to check your bags in on arrival and have them weighed. Presumably, this is to make sure that the coach doesn't suddenly tip over at high speed through the combined weight of luggage in the hold - something which we all know is a real problem everywhere else in the world. There's that sarcasm again, did you get that? Only after your luggage has been checked, ticketed and taken away from you, and you've been subjected to questions about whether or not you packed your bags yourself as though you're getting on an international flight wearing a Tee-Shirt on which is written "Terrorists do it at 30,000 feet",can you think about going and getting a cup of tea and waiting for your, um, flight to be called. It's all quite surreal, terribly bureaucratic, and almost certainly totally un-necessary. It does, however, add something to the whole travelling experience in Australia. Also, of course, some people might miss the opportunity to give somebody a chance to lose their luggage for them, and at least this way you don't actually get to see your bags being loaded onto the bus. Adds to the excitement! It was fairly late when we arrived, and after collecting our bags we stopped for a bite to eat from the food court. There really wasn't much open at that time of night and the people serving at the remaining fast food outlets really didn't look as though they wanted to be there. Tanya, being a vegetarian, got to pig out on something delicious from the veggie stand while I, unfortunately, had to be served by the only person remaining at Kentucky Fried Chicken who was doubling as cashier and chef and was clearly unfamiliar with the art of cooking a chicken so that it didn't taste like a sock. Then, with Tanya going on about how full she was and me mumbling under my breath about humane methods of execution for fast food chefs, we set about trying to locate our hotel. As we were essentially just passing through on our way north, I had booked us into somewhere which looked as though it would be comfortable for a couple of days rather than being particularly over the top. Nevertheless, it turned out that we were staying just about opposite the City Botanical Gardens and only a couple of blocks from the shopping district - so we didn't have far to go to get to anything. Our hotel, in fact, turned out to be better than I had been expecting and was clearly meant for people passing through on business - it even came with free broadband internet access in the room. We had a separate bedroom and living area, and a distant view of the river over the Botanical gardens from our window. After our brief dabble into the youth hostel experience in Surfers Paradise, we had clearly gone up market again. Nevertheless, we had limited time in Brisbane so we just threw our suitcases in a corner and went to bed in order to get an early start in the morning exploring the city. The central pedestrian mall on the junctions of Queen Street and Albert Streetis the main shopping destination for Brisbanites.The city does a fairly good job of pretending to be a lot smaller than it is, and since we were staying quite close to the Queen Street Mall and spent most of our time in the general area, I actually came away with the impression that Brisbane isn't much more than a few relaxed city blocks containing a pleasant community square, the mall and the botanic gardens. Obviously, we didn't have a long stay in which to explore further, but it's only after getting home and looking on a map that I realise just how sprawling Brisbane and its suburbs really are. This small town illusion isn't a bad thing by any means, and is a good indication of just how "cosy" Australians manage to make their cities feel. Whereas Britain tends to cover its cities in concrete and ugly grey office blocks stretching up to the sky, and seems to love employing architects who seriously believe a building shaped like an aubergine to be a fantastic idea, Australia still very much goes for large open community spaces, lots of greenery and parkland, and long relaxing walks between different shopping areas. Of course, Australians do have a tendency to use the word "city"in the same way Americans do - referring to just about everything larger than a small car park - but Brisbane actually manages to be a well spread out metropolis and home to nearly two million people without actually giving the feel to a visitor of being more than a small community. I applaud this, and very much wish London was the same. One of the most forward thinking innovations I saw in Brisbane while we were there was that the local government had installed free wireless internet hotspots around the Queen Street Mall. Anybody could just wander down to the shops with their laptop, sit on a bench anywhere along the street, and surf the internet. I don't suppose this is such a radical thing now that everybody has broadband at home and at the office - why would you take your laptop down the street when you can stay at home or plug in at the office without wasting the batteries - but it's small ideas like this which other countries seem unwilling to adopt which set Australia apart. While we were out, we decided to buy a phone card from the kiosk at the junction of the two main streets on the Brisbane mall - mainly because we would need to start phoning ahead for accommodation at any moment and being able to use a payphone in the street was going to be slightly more convenient than spending much of our remaining budget calling from our hotel room. To this day, I have no idea whether somebody made a mistake, or whether phone cards in Australia are just extraordinarily good value - but we certainly weren't short changed. I settled on a five dollar card, since there were options from various telecoms companies and I thought it might be best to start with a low value, see how long the card lasted, and perhaps go for a card from a different company later in the search for the best value. Well, I needn't have worried - the first time I put the card in a payphone and keyed in the handy six thousand digit security code printed on the reverse, I was welcomed by an automated Australian voice which told me chirpingly: "You have seven hundred and eighty six minutes of call time remaining on this card." I fully appreciate that this was an estimate and that it was probably based on the assumption that I would be making mostly local calls, but even after several weeks of using the card to call ahead and book rooms, and phoning home a couple of times, I was still being greeted by a cheery Australian lady telling me that I had many hundreds of minutes left. I still have it somewhere, although I expect it's expired by now. The first time you use a British phone card, all you usually get is a voice laughing at you and asking sarcastically if you seriously expect to be able to make an entire phone call for the mere ten pounds you paid for it! My favourite destination in Brisbane is, by far, the City Botanical Gardens. Australia, as I have said previously, excels in maintaining its wide open spaces rather than covering them in office blocks, and seems to be just as good at maintaining them as genuine back to nature retreats in the midst of city life. Every major city in the country has a large area set aside as botanic gardens, and they are all justifiably proud of their own and keen to point out how much more spectacular they are than everyone else's! Now, I should point out here that neither Tanya or I are massive fans of the whole formal gardens thing - the idea that somebody has planted an area of grass several miles square and then dotted it with perfectly round flowerbeds connected with cute little cobbled paths seems to be a particularly British thing and rather makes us want to run screaming in the opposite direction. These places, it always seems to me whenever I'm forced to walk through one on my way somewhere, are mainly frequented by ladies in their eighties walking in pairs pointing at daffodils and saying "Oh look Mavis, isn't that lovely?" to each other at regular intervals. This is ironic as it's usually exactly these sorts of people who have trouble even getting out of bed in the morning without falling over, let alone being expected to walk around miles of labyrinthine pathways looking for pansies. I can't speak for Tanya, but personally my impression of city gardens was a bit clouded by this stereotype and I hadn't held up a lot of hope for the botanic gardens, so I have to say that I was very pleasantly surprised by the ones in Brisbane. I then went on to be even more pleasantly surprised to discover over the following weeks that the Australians seem to guard their natural habitats very closely and would generally rather have a pointed stick rammed up their bottom and be shot out of a cannon than allow anybody with a degree in architecture to go anywhere near them! The City Botanic Gardens aren't, by any means, the largest in Australia. However, this less sprawling layout makes it easier to find your way around and to use the gardens as a place to relax and spend the day without having to wander around with a seventy page guidebook trying to work out where to go next, as you do in some of the larger ones elsewhere. Entering from Alice Street, you find the sound of the city vanishing surprisingly quickly. A path leads off towards the central rotunda which clearly acts as a meeting point in the park, and to the right there is a large ornamental pond around which Ibis and Lizards wander looking for visitors to feed them. Of course, as in all these places, feeding the animals is not encouraged, but nevertheless people still crowd around the pond and sit on the surrounding benches handing out bread to anything which seems interested. Which is to say, every living creature in the park. I'd only just got through the gate, and already I felt as though I really wanted a place like this near to my home in England. The nearest thing I had in London at the time was a small featureless park with a small duck pond, usually filled with obnoxious teenagers (the park, not the pond - we haven't begun drowning our troublemakers yet) throwing litter on the grass, wiping their noses on their sleeves and saying "Innit" to each other at regular intervals for no apparent reason. I've since moved. As with most botanical gardens in Australia, the park is divided into themed areas through which visitors can experience flora and fauna from different regions of the country. For example, a stroll along the path to the north of the gardens allows you to surround yourself with giant strangler fig trees (also known, less dramatically, as the Banyan Fig). This scary looking species, more prevalent in northern Queensland, looks like something you might expect to find in a haunted forest or a horror movie. The trees usually start life as a result of a seed dropped by a bird which lodges itself in a small hole in the bark of another tree. The strangler then uses this tree as a host, growing its roots downward toward the soil below and winding them around the host until it has literally sucked all the nutrients out of it. Strangler figs are usually found in dark woodland like that of the rainforests in northern Queensland, where there is limited space for new trees to grow and sunlight is at a premium under the dense canopy - stranglers often end up as circles of branches around a hollow core, where the host tree has died and rotted away. They really are something spectacular to behold, and tourism companies will often take groups out to see the larger ones which really do look like something out of a fantasy world and just have to be seen to be believed. At the centre of the gardens is a single wooden post sticking out of the ground, atop which is a metal date marker which reads 1974. This is a flood mark which was erected in 1999 to commemorate the many floods which have devastated the region over the last two centuries, and in particular indicates the high point of the great flood of 1974 when the water rose to a height of four and a half meters, destroying many of the most prized areas of the gardens and closing them for over two months. Many of the palm trees around the gardens still lean quite noticeably from the force of the flood waters, and various attempts to right them using pulleys have failed. I say just leave them alone - let nature design its own look! Close by, a grove contains a collection of around twenty five species of bamboo and this commemorates the loss of one of the gardens best loved early attractions, Fern Island, a small island in a lagoon at the centre of the park which was reached by way of wooden foot bridges. The lagoon was reluctantly drained and filled, and Fern Island removed in 1937 as a result of increasing complaints from locals about the swarms of mosquitoes it drew in. It would seem as though the City Botanical Gardens are keen to remind us that nothing lasts forever. One of the last remaining features from the original gardens, in fact, is its famous Tamarind Tree. Planted in the mid-nineteenth century to provide food for early settlers, it still produces fruit to this day. One of the most attractive things about the City Botanical Gardens is the fact that they are located right on the river front, and this, in itself, would be something which would be likely to draw me to the Brisbane area were I ever to be looking to relocate to an Australian city. By making your way through the park and past the restaurant, you find the trees starting to close in and begin to enter an area which feels altogether more natural and less and less as though you're in the middle of a big city. A little further on, you come out onto the quite amazing mangrove boardwalk. Built along the river front but also under a dense canopy of trees so that you feel mostly hidden from the city and more as though you're on a river in the forest than in a place like Brisbane, the mangrove walk really is something quite unlike anything I've seen before in any garden or park of any kind. Suddenly, the sounds of people disappear behind you, the densely packed trees acting as a natural barrier to much of the noise from the surrounding area. The only sound, apart from the occasional footsteps of your fellow visitors, is that of insects and birds in the trees or wading in the mud between the mangroves. What makes the mangrove boardwalk in Brisbane so special is that no attempt seems to have been made to make it at all touristy. Along a large section of the river bank mud filled mangrove swamps are surrounded by dense woodland and vegetation, and wooden boardwalks zig-zag across its surface, held in place only by the suction of the mud beneath. It's as though somebody has lifted a section of mangrove swamp from beside a river in a tropical forest somewhere and dropped it in Brisbane, sticking the odd wooden pathway across it so people can pass through without sinking up to their shoulders in mud! Australians are well known for their love of ecology and maintaining a natural environment, so much so that it sometimes feels as though taking a photograph of an animal out in the bush might result in a policeman suddenly appearing from out of nowhere and carting you off to jail for disturbing it (This is true of Aborigines, by the way. If you take a photo of an Aborigine without asking first, and he doesn't like it, expect to spend some time behind bars. Pretty much the same thing applies if you take a rock home or disturb the environment of Australia in any way - such is the Australian's all-encompassing wish to leave everything and everyone undisturbed.) This attitude to the environment definitely shows itself here, where virtually no unnecessary tinkering is done with the mangrove swamps other than to maintain the boardwalk from time to time. Stopping along the route and peering over the railings at the mud below reveals a plethora of swamp life, from minute crabs scuttling over the surface to wading birds who really look as though they shouldn't be able to stand on the mud without sinking. This is the nearest many of us will get to exploring a full-sized mangrove swamp without flying somewhere that requires a lot of injections - and on the way home, you can walk back along the river bank at the edge of the gardens and see some of the last remaining Australian Blue Gum trees in the area. Always assuming, of course, that you can avoid being run over by the cyclists who like to use the river path as a raceway. Our stop in Brisbane had only been brief, but enjoyable. Our next port of call was much further north, in Cairns. On my previous trip, I had been fortunate enough to go SCUBA diving on the Great Barrier Reef amongst other things, and was looking forward to introducing Tanya to some of the same experiences. Our ultimate destination on the east coast was the rainforests of northern Queensland, where I had already booked a hotel in the heart of the forest, but first we had to use our new super-value phone card to call ahead and book somewhere to stay on arrival in Cairns as the courtesy bus to take us to our rainforest retreat wasn't due to pick us up for a couple of days. Suitcases in hand, we headed back to the Brisbane Transit Centre where we booked ourselves in and spent our last hour in the city wandering around the shops on the lower level and looking through our guide books for things to do in Cairns. This was going to be our longest coach trip yet...My complete travel journals are at www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and /globalwanderer2

not 2 flashy go to the gold coat instead lol

Go to Mount Coot-tha and the botanical gardens - both are great. Also go to one of the many Koala sanctuaries - you'll fall in love!

A visit to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary is a must. There you can learn all about the koala and other Australian species. Hold a koala (and get your photo), you can also interact with kangaroos while you're there. Next you need to take a trip to Moreton Island to the Tangalooma Wild Dolphin Resort

The locals will happily tell you that Brisbane is the only Australian capital city to enjoy a perfect climate - and who would argue with them. Brisbane, like so many early settlements along the coast of eastern Australia, started life as a penal colony. It is thought that the Ngundanbi and Yagara Aborigines lived along the banks of the river before Europeans settled the area. Do not miss the NAB - National Bank Building, located on the corner of Queen and Creek Streets (308-322 Queen Street) this huge and gracious building is regarded as the finest Classical Revival building in Australia. The treasurey casino is a must! Second in beauty as a casino only to that in Monaco. Casablanca on Caxton Street is a good britro style restautant, nightclub etc

Hidden Gems
There are a couple of hidden gems right in the city centre. The first being the Pancake Manor located at 18 Charlotte St. They serve sweet and savoury pancakes which are both quite good, but what makes the place unique is where the place was constructed. The exterior of the building is an old cathedral built in 1904. They preserved the cathedral and basically built a box inside it which houses the restaurant, but you can still enjoy the beautiful cathedral ceilings and stained glass windows.

The second little gem is something that I noticed while just walking down Queen Street, the main street in downtown Brisbane. It's called the Regent Theatre , built in 1929 it was a home to a myriad of different stage shows. Since that time it has been converted into a movie theatre but the original entrance interior has been preserved; it's worth poking your nose in for a peek even if you don't want to go watch a movie.

Brisbane - the capital city of Sunshine Coast-Queensland Popular place - Warner Bros.Movie World!!! - U can cuddle with Looney Tunes charaters - Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety, Lala, Tazzie Devil Sylvester.... Gold Coast - Dream World !!! Dance sing at Wiggles World with all The Wiggles Friends.

Our time on the Gold Coast went quickly, and we didn't really have much time to do more than see Wet N' Wild and DreamWorld before heading onward. Every time we returned to our hostel, it seemed as though someone was heading out to a party with a crate of beer, but we just wanted to relax for a few days before heading further north towards the rainforests of northern Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef. Before that, however, I had booked a couple of nights stopover in Brisbane. On my previous trip in 1998, I really hadn't seen much more of the city than the inside of the transit centre, and ever since people had been keen to tell me what I'd been missing. To be honest, I wasn't expecting too much as my experience of Australian cities other than Sydney and Perth are that they tend to be nowhere near on the scale of cities back home and not exactly hubs of activity - but I was more than willing to be proved wrong. As I often am. As you drive into Brisbane and follow a line of coaches up a dreary looking circular ramp into the Transit Centre, it's easy to wake up after a long journey, look out of the window at the featureless grey walls passing by and draw a hasty conclusion, as I did, that you're entering just another dismal city of square office blocks and grid-system roads. The Brisbane Transit Centre, which is about as much as I managed to see of the city the last time I was here, appears on arrival to be a multi-storey car park for coaches with a split level lounge and waiting area placed on top as an afterthought - from the outside, it certainly isn't designed to give the impression of a gateway into a vibrant modern city. Once you disembark from your coach and go inside, however, it suddenly seems as though you might have to think again. The centre comprises almost an entire city block and the lounge provides everything a tired traveller could possibly want while waiting for a connection - shops, fast food restaurants, an internet cafe, arcade machines, rest areas and televisions. In fact, if you travel down on the escalator below the two waiting levels, you'll find an entire food court and shopping centre. Anyone familiar with dingy coach stations elsewhere would almost certainly be slightly taken aback by the Brisbane Transit Centre - it's more like an airport than a glorified bus stop, complete with a separate level for arrivals and departures, monitors hanging from the ceiling with estimated times for all incoming and outgoing coaches, and ongoing announcements telling you when your coach is ready for boarding and through which gate you should go to find it! Believe it or not, you're even expected to check your bags in on arrival and have them weighed. Presumably, this is to make sure that the coach doesn't suddenly tip over at high speed through the combined weight of luggage in the hold - something which we all know is a real problem everywhere else in the world. There's that sarcasm again, did you get that? Only after your luggage has been checked, ticketed and taken away from you, and you've been subjected to questions about whether or not you packed your bags yourself as though you're getting on an international flight wearing a Tee-Shirt on which is written "Terrorists do it at 30,000 feet",can you think about going and getting a cup of tea and waiting for your, um, flight to be called. It's all quite surreal, terribly bureaucratic, and almost certainly totally un-necessary. It does, however, add something to the whole travelling experience in Australia. Also, of course, some people might miss the opportunity to give somebody a chance to lose their luggage for them, and at least this way you don't actually get to see your bags being loaded onto the bus. Adds to the excitement! It was fairly late when we arrived, and after collecting our bags we stopped for a bite to eat from the food court. There really wasn't much open at that time of night and the people serving at the remaining fast food outlets really didn't look as though they wanted to be there. Tanya, being a vegetarian, got to pig out on something delicious from the veggie stand while I, unfortunately, had to be served by the only person remaining at Kentucky Fried Chicken who was doubling as cashier and chef and was clearly unfamiliar with the art of cooking a chicken so that it didn't taste like a sock. Then, with Tanya going on about how full she was and me mumbling under my breath about humane methods of execution for fast food chefs, we set about trying to locate our hotel. As we were essentially just passing through on our way north, I had booked us into somewhere which looked as though it would be comfortable for a couple of days rather than being particularly over the top. Nevertheless, it turned out that we were staying just about opposite the City Botanical Gardens and only a couple of blocks from the shopping district - so we didn't have far to go to get to anything. Our hotel, in fact, turned out to be better than I had been expecting and was clearly meant for people passing through on business - it even came with free broadband internet access in the room. We had a separate bedroom and living area, and a distant view of the river over the Botanical gardens from our window. After our brief dabble into the youth hostel experience in Surfers Paradise, we had clearly gone up market again. Nevertheless, we had limited time in Brisbane so we just threw our suitcases in a corner and went to bed in order to get an early start in the morning exploring the city. The central pedestrian mall on the junctions of Queen Street and Albert Streetis the main shopping destination for Brisbanites.The city does a fairly good job of pretending to be a lot smaller than it is, and since we were staying quite close to the Queen Street Mall and spent most of our time in the general area, I actually came away with the impression that Brisbane isn't much more than a few relaxed city blocks containing a pleasant community square, the mall and the botanic gardens. Obviously, we didn't have a long stay in which to explore further, but it's only after getting home and looking on a map that I realise just how sprawling Brisbane and its suburbs really are. This small town illusion isn't a bad thing by any means, and is a good indication of just how "cosy" Australians manage to make their cities feel. Whereas Britain tends to cover its cities in concrete and ugly grey office blocks stretching up to the sky, and seems to love employing architects who seriously believe a building shaped like an aubergine to be a fantastic idea, Australia still very much goes for large open community spaces, lots of greenery and parkland, and long relaxing walks between different shopping areas. Of course, Australians do have a tendency to use the word "city"in the same way Americans do - referring to just about everything larger than a small car park - but Brisbane actually manages to be a well spread out metropolis and home to nearly two million people without actually giving the feel to a visitor of being more than a small community. I applaud this, and very much wish London was the same. One of the most forward thinking innovations I saw in Brisbane while we were there was that the local government had installed free wireless internet hotspots around the Queen Street Mall. Anybody could just wander down to the shops with their laptop, sit on a bench anywhere along the street, and surf the internet. I don't suppose this is such a radical thing now that everybody has broadband at home and at the office - why would you take your laptop down the street when you can stay at home or plug in at the office without wasting the batteries - but it's small ideas like this which other countries seem unwilling to adopt which set Australia apart. While we were out, we decided to buy a phone card from the kiosk at the junction of the two main streets on the Brisbane mall - mainly because we would need to start phoning ahead for accommodation at any moment and being able to use a payphone in the street was going to be slightly more convenient than spending much of our remaining budget calling from our hotel room. To this day, I have no idea whether somebody made a mistake, or whether phone cards in Australia are just extraordinarily good value - but we certainly weren't short changed. I settled on a five dollar card, since there were options from various telecoms companies and I thought it might be best to start with a low value, see how long the card lasted, and perhaps go for a card from a different company later in the search for the best value. Well, I needn't have worried - the first time I put the card in a payphone and keyed in the handy six thousand digit security code printed on the reverse, I was welcomed by an automated Australian voice which told me chirpingly: "You have seven hundred and eighty six minutes of call time remaining on this card." I fully appreciate that this was an estimate and that it was probably based on the assumption that I would be making mostly local calls, but even after several weeks of using the card to call ahead and book rooms, and phoning home a couple of times, I was still being greeted by a cheery Australian lady telling me that I had many hundreds of minutes left. I still have it somewhere, although I expect it's expired by now. The first time you use a British phone card, all you usually get is a voice laughing at you and asking sarcastically if you seriously expect to be able to make an entire phone call for the mere ten pounds you paid for it! My favourite destination in Brisbane is, by far, the City Botanical Gardens. Australia, as I have said previously, excels in maintaining its wide open spaces rather than covering them in office blocks, and seems to be just as good at maintaining them as genuine back to nature retreats in the midst of city life. Every major city in the country has a large area set aside as botanic gardens, and they are all justifiably proud of their own and keen to point out how much more spectacular they are than everyone else's! Now, I should point out here that neither Tanya or I are massive fans of the whole formal gardens thing - the idea that somebody has planted an area of grass several miles square and then dotted it with perfectly round flowerbeds connected with cute little cobbled paths seems to be a particularly British thing and rather makes us want to run screaming in the opposite direction. These places, it always seems to me whenever I'm forced to walk through one on my way somewhere, are mainly frequented by ladies in their eighties walking in pairs pointing at daffodils and saying "Oh look Mavis, isn't that lovely?" to each other at regular intervals. This is ironic as it's usually exactly these sorts of people who have trouble even getting out of bed in the morning without falling over, let alone being expected to walk around miles of labyrinthine pathways looking for pansies. I can't speak for Tanya, but personally my impression of city gardens was a bit clouded by this stereotype and I hadn't held up a lot of hope for the botanic gardens, so I have to say that I was very pleasantly surprised by the ones in Brisbane. I then went on to be even more pleasantly surprised to discover over the following weeks that the Australians seem to guard their natural habitats very closely and would generally rather have a pointed stick rammed up their bottom and be shot out of a cannon than allow anybody with a degree in architecture to go anywhere near them! The City Botanic Gardens aren't, by any means, the largest in Australia. However, this less sprawling layout makes it easier to find your way around and to use the gardens as a place to relax and spend the day without having to wander around with a seventy page guidebook trying to work out where to go next, as you do in some of the larger ones elsewhere. Entering from Alice Street, you find the sound of the city vanishing surprisingly quickly. A path leads off towards the central rotunda which clearly acts as a meeting point in the park, and to the right there is a large ornamental pond around which Ibis and Lizards wander looking for visitors to feed them. Of course, as in all these places, feeding the animals is not encouraged, but nevertheless people still crowd around the pond and sit on the surrounding benches handing out bread to anything which seems interested. Which is to say, every living creature in the park. I'd only just got through the gate, and already I felt as though I really wanted a place like this near to my home in England. The nearest thing I had in London at the time was a small featureless park with a small duck pond, usually filled with obnoxious teenagers (the park, not the pond - we haven't begun drowning our troublemakers yet) throwing litter on the grass, wiping their noses on their sleeves and saying "Innit" to each other at regular intervals for no apparent reason. I've since moved. As with most botanical gardens in Australia, the park is divided into themed areas through which visitors can experience flora and fauna from different regions of the country. For example, a stroll along the path to the north of the gardens allows you to surround yourself with giant strangler fig trees (also known, less dramatically, as the Banyan Fig). This scary looking species, more prevalent in northern Queensland, looks like something you might expect to find in a haunted forest or a horror movie. The trees usually start life as a result of a seed dropped by a bird which lodges itself in a small hole in the bark of another tree. The strangler then uses this tree as a host, growing its roots downward toward the soil below and winding them around the host until it has literally sucked all the nutrients out of it. Strangler figs are usually found in dark woodland like that of the rainforests in northern Queensland, where there is limited space for new trees to grow and sunlight is at a premium under the dense canopy - stranglers often end up as circles of branches around a hollow core, where the host tree has died and rotted away. They really are something spectacular to behold, and tourism companies will often take groups out to see the larger ones which really do look like something out of a fantasy world and just have to be seen to be believed. At the centre of the gardens is a single wooden post sticking out of the ground, atop which is a metal date marker which reads 1974. This is a flood mark which was erected in 1999 to commemorate the many floods which have devastated the region over the last two centuries, and in particular indicates the high point of the great flood of 1974 when the water rose to a height of four and a half meters, destroying many of the most prized areas of the gardens and closing them for over two months. Many of the palm trees around the gardens still lean quite noticeably from the force of the flood waters, and various attempts to right them using pulleys have failed. I say just leave them alone - let nature design its own look! Close by, a grove contains a collection of around twenty five species of bamboo and this commemorates the loss of one of the gardens best loved early attractions, Fern Island, a small island in a lagoon at the centre of the park which was reached by way of wooden foot bridges. The lagoon was reluctantly drained and filled, and Fern Island removed in 1937 as a result of increasing complaints from locals about the swarms of mosquitoes it drew in. It would seem as though the City Botanical Gardens are keen to remind us that nothing lasts forever. One of the last remaining features from the original gardens, in fact, is its famous Tamarind Tree. Planted in the mid-nineteenth century to provide food for early settlers, it still produces fruit to this day. One of the most attractive things about the City Botanical Gardens is the fact that they are located right on the river front, and this, in itself, would be something which would be likely to draw me to the Brisbane area were I ever to be looking to relocate to an Australian city. By making your way through the park and past the restaurant, you find the trees starting to close in and begin to enter an area which feels altogether more natural and less and less as though you're in the middle of a big city. A little further on, you come out onto the quite amazing mangrove boardwalk. Built along the river front but also under a dense canopy of trees so that you feel mostly hidden from the city and more as though you're on a river in the forest than in a place like Brisbane, the mangrove walk really is something quite unlike anything I've seen before in any garden or park of any kind. Suddenly, the sounds of people disappear behind you, the densely packed trees acting as a natural barrier to much of the noise from the surrounding area. The only sound, apart from the occasional footsteps of your fellow visitors, is that of insects and birds in the trees or wading in the mud between the mangroves. What makes the mangrove boardwalk in Brisbane so special is that no attempt seems to have been made to make it at all touristy. Along a large section of the river bank mud filled mangrove swamps are surrounded by dense woodland and vegetation, and wooden boardwalks zig-zag across its surface, held in place only by the suction of the mud beneath. It's as though somebody has lifted a section of mangrove swamp from beside a river in a tropical forest somewhere and dropped it in Brisbane, sticking the odd wooden pathway across it so people can pass through without sinking up to their shoulders in mud! Australians are well known for their love of ecology and maintaining a natural environment, so much so that it sometimes feels as though taking a photograph of an animal out in the bush might result in a policeman suddenly appearing from out of nowhere and carting you off to jail for disturbing it (This is true of Aborigines, by the way. If you take a photo of an Aborigine without asking first, and he doesn't like it, expect to spend some time behind bars. Pretty much the same thing applies if you take a rock home or disturb the environment of Australia in any way - such is the Australian's all-encompassing wish to leave everything and everyone undisturbed.) This attitude to the environment definitely shows itself here, where virtually no unnecessary tinkering is done with the mangrove swamps other than to maintain the boardwalk from time to time. Stopping along the route and peering over the railings at the mud below reveals a plethora of swamp life, from minute crabs scuttling over the surface to wading birds who really look as though they shouldn't be able to stand on the mud without sinking. This is the nearest many of us will get to exploring a full-sized mangrove swamp without flying somewhere that requires a lot of injections - and on the way home, you can walk back along the river bank at the edge of the gardens and see some of the last remaining Australian Blue Gum trees in the area. Always assuming, of course, that you can avoid being run over by the cyclists who like to use the river path as a raceway. Our stop in Brisbane had only been brief, but enjoyable. Our next port of call was much further north, in Cairns. On my previous trip, I had been fortunate enough to go SCUBA diving on the Great Barrier Reef amongst other things, and was looking forward to introducing Tanya to some of the same experiences. Our ultimate destination on the east coast was the rainforests of northern Queensland, where I had already booked a hotel in the heart of the forest, but first we had to use our new super-value phone card to call ahead and book somewhere to stay on arrival in Cairns as the courtesy bus to take us to our rainforest retreat wasn't due to pick us up for a couple of days. Suitcases in hand, we headed back to the Brisbane Transit Centre where we booked ourselves in and spent our last hour in the city wandering around the shops on the lower level and looking through our guide books for things to do in Cairns. This was going to be our longest coach trip yet...My complete travel journals are at www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and /globalwanderer2

Brisbane International Airport (BNE) has build by two parts - the domestic and the international terminals- and they are some distance apart, connected by bus and by the rail line. The International Terminal is compact and well laid out, with plenty of obvious signs and hotel information desks. However, if your are a foreigner arriving at the peak morning arrival time, expect a wait of over few hours to get through immigration department. This is as bad as I have seen anywhere in the world, and it is frustrating for Australians as well, because the luggage carousels get completely clogged up and end up being stopped to wait for the foreign arrivals to 'catch up' with their luggage. I spoke to one forlorn looking Australian who was waiting for his bags by a stationary, but jam-packed luggage carousel. "It's always like this" he said. "I get through immigration in few minutes and then wait most of an hour for my bags to get through". It seems utterly absurd. Not a good image for Brisbane. Leaving Brisbane was remarkably easy and efficient though. Note that they are particularly strong on the "one carry on bag per economy passenger" though...more so than I have seen anywhere else.