Day 11: The rain in Brisbane falls mostly on our manes

Not much action today because it was another travel day; this time from Sydney to Brisbane which is our last Australian stop. The trains and planes were uneventful if not expensive. It seems that in Australia it costs around $15 to get downtown from the airport no matter which city you’re flying into. In Sydney and Brisbane the trains run out to the airport and the process is pretty easy. Melbourne and Cairns has bus service and it’s a bit tougher and requires some pre-arrangement – hence all the cab travel there.

Anyhow, Brisbane is quite different than the other three cities we’ve traveled to in that it doesn’t seem to be a tourist spot. Aside from the train from the airport things have been noticeably cheaper and the pace much less frenetic. It seems to be a sleepy Midwestern city to the vibrant Sydney and Melbourne which both have a much busier feel. It probably has a lot to do with all the tourists heading south to the Gold Coast and Surfers Paradise rather than staying in Brisbane proper.

After settling in at our swank hotel The Portal, we took a late afternoon/early evening stroll. Since it is only spring here, the sun sets early so it’s dark by 5:30 or 6. We first strolled along the Brisbane River along a walkway that was quite popular with joggers and bikers and had lots of little cafes and bars along the way. We ended up eating at a place called The Verve which was a new age-y Italian place in the basement of some office building. It was actually quite nice and cozy with all exposed brick and dark lighting. The food was great, we hadn’t had food this good since that Mexican place in Melbourne, and it may have even been better than that! I had a chicken and bleu cheese risotto and Kirsten had a chicken and goat cheese gnocchi. Excellent. It also may have been the cheapest meal we’ve eaten this whole time that wasn’t fast food. Australia has a minimum wage of about $15/hour and it really drives the prices up in the service industry. But you can’t complain too much because at least the workers are actually making a living wage.

Then we walked outside and got across the street before the sky opened up without warning and began raining in a torrential fashion so we ducked into a Belgian Beer Garden to keep dry. This was a very nice bar, quite affordable, and very spacious. After a beer apiece and after the rain had passed we continued walking down to the historic end of Brisbane. As I walked past the old parliamentary buildings and rowhouses I got to wondering how much of this was around when my Grandpa spent time here during World War II. Something to ask him when I get home.

At one point we left downtown and walked onto a university campus that wasn’t on our maps, but directly across from the campus was the botanical gardens. Now, because it’s well after dark at this point we got treated to some nocturnal life that seemed completely uninteresting to all the students leaving their night classes but was very interesting to us. We first saw some sort of marsupial climbing around on the trees with a youngster attached to her back. She eventually made her way down to the ground and walked along the path completely oblivious to the college students who were likewise oblivious to her. Basically I think we saw the Australian equivalent of a squirrel. But it was exciting! [update: later we discovered that these were possums - which are not the same as American opossums.]

But even better than that, the botanical gardens also has a LOT of flying foxes. We stood under the trees watching them flapping around from limb to limb and out over the park, squawking at each other, and generally being exciting to us (again, the college students didn’t care) for at least a half hour. Flying foxes are the world’s largest bats and as the name implies they look remarkably similar to foxes with reddish fur on their heads and distinctly canine faces and their wingspans looked like they were around five feet. They eat fruit and see quite well because they don’t rely on echolocation. It was amazing watching them fly overhead because they’re SO big and watching as they crashed into the trees as they landed because they’re SO big! Graceful and birdlike they are not but they are ridiculously cute and I want one.

So that was all very very exciting to us and we walked back to The Portal and found that we had paid the price as our shoes were just caked with bat poop. So we washed our shoes off and cleaned out our treads with a q-tip and ended up plugging up the sink with poop which we had to clear out and dump into the toilet. There are still lots of little undigested seeds all over the bathroom that just sort of went everywhere. Maybe now I don’t want one so bad. Perhaps just a plush toy version would suffice.