Brisbane, Australia

Welcome to "Bris Vegas"!

My visit to Brisbane is putting my other flying visits so far to shame. I arrived here on Friday evening, and leave Monday at noon. How did I ever think I could see a city of 1.5 million people in two days?!

Once more I am staying at the YHA hostel, which is nice, albeit not quite as excellent as the one in Adelaide (as I suspected). The most noticeable thing about Brisbane is the heat - it's 35º every day, and very humid: I'm back in the Tropics, which the wildlife and scenery bear witness to. The heat makes it impossible to do much, but nevertheless I have persevered and every waking hour have been plodding the streets, desperately trying to find something to distinguish Brisbane from any other city...

Cynicism aside, it is a nice place. The centre is surrounded on three sides by a river (the Brisbane River, no less) and there are plenty of malls and small parks and gardens to break up the city. One thing I have noticed is that there are literally dozens of tiny 7-eleven stores, seemingly on every street corner (in fact at one junction there are two!), all of which sell the same merchandise, and all of which are open 24 hours a day. I may have touched on this last time I saw one, in Singapore airport. What do you call a 7-eleven that never closes?

On Saturday evening I went to Brisbane's Chinatown, acting on a tip from a German room-mate. (Anecdote alert: when I arrived we struck up the usual conversation. "Ver are you from?" "England." "Ah, England? I come from the Chermany", he said, stroking his moustache.) Chinatown is just a couple of blocks north of the centre, and is actually home to Chinese, Japanese and Korean shops and restaurants, which gives it a nice multicultural feel. One of the strangest things about Australia is how white it is. It's genuinely strange to see an Asian, black or Aboriginal when you walk down the street.

On Sunday I had wanted to meet up with some friends of a friend and go to their church which is outside the city, but that didn't work out sadly, so instead I took a trip outside the city... to the zoo! It took flipping ages to get there (two hours each way on the train) but was worth the trip. This was the "Australia Zoo", home of Steve Irwin, who you may think of as either (a) the man who hunts crocodiles, or (b) the man who nearly feeds his baby to a crocodile.

Either way, he wasn't there in person, but he was there in cardboard-cutout form, sporting a range of facial expressions that, had they spoken, said "Cor!" and grappling a range of large and dangerous wildlife. My kind of wildlife is the kind that is in a zoo, and so it was with great relish (and chips) that I enjoyed the kangaroos, koalas, Tasmanian devils, emus, and of course crocodiles, which were fed by a slightly deranged zoo-keeper with goats' heads. (The crocodiles, you understand, not the keeper... oh, never mind.)

On Sunday evening I did make it to church, a "Pressy" church (maybe they don't know how to spell it either) complete with Scottish minister. Tomorrow (Monday) I shall nip round the parts that I haven't seen yet of the city, mainly the markets, and then sit on a bus for nine hours to go to Coffs Harbour, a small town about half way from here to Sydney.