Very good beginning of Christmas to everyone! Last three months we've been living in Brisbane, in Australia's Queensland. On our arrival to Australia's capital city, Sydney, we instantly noticed the change in climate. Suddenly it was warmer again, than it had been in NZ, still not the best weather though. One day we did a lovely walk to the Botanic Gardens just around sunset and were amazed to see and hear(!) hundreds of birds all getting ready to socialise and eat. And I don't mean "the normal" European birds but colourfull parrots, cockatoos, ibis-birds and others... And of course Bats. Loads of them too! :) That was absolutely brilliant. From there we continued our walk towards the famous Sydney Opera House in Sydney Harbour, and I can tell you, that was not disapointing either. It is a good idea to take a regular ferry along the river around sunset and see both the Opera house and Sydney Harbour Bridge on warm evening light. It's fairly cheap and you have amazing views. See here for live image. Finding (cheap) accommodation turned out to be quite difficult. Sydney has many different kinds of suburbian areas and not all of them pleasant. With cheap places you might end up to a strange part of town, like we did, twice. But of course that does not have to be a bad experience, we were fairly happy in our second place in a more "altenatively hip" , young area, even if it was noisy and a bit dirty. But we were not disapointed to leave Sydney and fly to hot, hot Brisbane! :) | |||
Brisbane is a nice city to be in for a while. It's fairly green, with few parks and the weather is basically always warm, even too warm as we noticed at the beginning of the summer season. The Brisbane river that runs through the city is a lovely place to take a walk or cruise along with the City-Cat ferry. There are some great views along the way. Probably the nicest area that we came accross is South Bank parklands. There is nice handicraft market every weekend and also concerts and swimming in a built in beach. Very nice after dark especially. Best area to go out is definitely the Fortitude Valley, with more alternative scene and music, even if we didn't manage to explore the bars very much. We did enjoy the outdoor cinema though and watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show with bats flying above us in the darkness. Very cool experience. And we also did some theatre, by watching one of my favorite stories, The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe, which is a story about the magical world of Narnia, which the evil white witch has bewiched to be forever winter :) | |||
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After it was time to head back to our lovely Brisbane. We stopped to take pics of some amazingly red, red soil on the fields and by the road for few times and ended our trip in a national park near Brisbane, where we were just around dusk and saw many wild wallabies eating in grassy fields. These people here don't need cows to keep the grass short. By that time a great, big thunder cloud was following us on our way and we saw some mighty lightnings, plus we had to keep constant watch for kangaroos crossing the roads. They are major cause of road accidents in Australia. We were lucky and only saw one small one by the road. On Christmas day I had work at the Surfer's Paradise, so we celebrated on a beach. Not too bad. Area itself is not the nicest, it's very tourist oriented and modern looking with big block hotels, but the beach is very big too, so it kind of makes it ok. Happy New Year 2004 to everyone and see you next time in Singapore!! |
