Day Trips in Brizzy

 10/09/2012
 Although not stumped for things to do, we are trying not to visit the city too often for fear of upsetting the natives as we bumble around. So what did we do today? Packed an eski ( remembering a nice chilled bottle of chardy) and headed for the bloody hills…….again.
 Today’s hill was Mt Glorious, superbly named as it really is a glorious spot with picnic areas well shaded in the D’Aguilar N P. The road up is particularly steep and winding, well, the one we went on was. There is a less hazardous one but the navigator didn’t spot it on her map.
  After lunch we walked a spectacular track for 2k in the rain forest, enormous trees but no water in any of the creeks. On the way down from the mountain ( the easy route) there are some spectacular lookout points with walking tracks looping back to the start, none of them look to be too taxing so maybe we will have a trip back to them later in the week. A weekday is definitely the time to come up here as there is no one around. They must be all wandering around in the city wondering where we are!

 11/09/202
  Exciting times for us as we have spent the morning with a travel agent, planning our journey home. All our flights are booked and the total trip will take around 10 weeks starting in Perth in the middle of February 2013. We will drive across Australia to Perth and from there we fly to Auckland, NZ and then on to Christchurch on the South Island. After a mooch around the south island we will make our way back up to Auckland and fly to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. From there we fly  to Bali, Indonesia for a month or so then back to K L for 3 nights before travelling on to London. The whole flight package is incredibly cheap as we have caught some good deals, but the best bit is we are flying Perth to Auckland first class. We are now learning to put on posh accents. In the meantime we still have 6 month of Australia to discover and the rest of this week to play with the Brisbane traffic before we move on.

 12/09/2012
 There is a lot to see in Brisbane, all you need to do is get off the train at a different station around the city. Today we found ourselves in China Town (more by good luck than anything else) which is fairly close to the city centre. It’s a very colourful area with obviously lots of Chinese restaurants. There are a couple of Chinese supermarkets, meat shops with strange looking bits of duck and pork and chicken, and a shop selling traditional Chinese herbal remedies and that was it. We had done it in just over an hour and that included Jane having her hair cut.
 We explored the cultural centre of the city after having  lunch in a terribly posh food hall frequented by the staff from the Supreme Court, Magistrate Court and the Commonwealth Court. It was all up market sushi and design your own sandwich sort of stuff. We sat eating our fish and chips on the balcony overlooking the courts and out towards Roma Street gardens, before heading for our bit of culture.
  The first building we came to was the gallery of modern art, so we walked around the outside of that. Then there was the Queensland Art Gallery doing masterpieces from the Prado, all about Spain apparently. We gave that a miss but did have a good look round the Museum. The museum also has a science centre but we left that for another day as our feet were aching. Time to ride home and have a cold one, enough of this culture.