Part 2 - Sunshine Coast & Brisbane

March 12 - 13, 2008

Wednesday, March 12th: Sunshine Coast

We woke up early again and left the hotel around 8:30 to drive north out of Brisbane toward an area called the Sunshine Coast to see the Glass House Mountains. We stopped for gas at a service centre along the motorway, and spent $56 Australian for 40 litres of gas. I have no idea how much money or how much gas that was.

Eventually we started catching glimpses of the Glass House Mountains, a series of isolated peaks rising from a plain. The peaks are lava plugs, remnants of old volcanoes, and they all have odd and unique shapes. We drove through pineapple fields, and orchards with some kind of tree that we couldn't identify - maybe olive trees? There were also some beautiful purple trees in bloom all over the place, but we never could get a good picture of one because they were never located near a place that we could stop. (You can see one in the distance in that pineapple field photo, though.) Eventually we got to the Glass House Mountains Lookout, which had nice views of the mountains, but probably not as good as the ones we got from the car on the drive in. We walked a little trail around the lookout with tons of birds making noise all around us.

Next, we drove to the head of the Mt. Ngungun trail, which is a 2.4 km round trip climb to the top of one of the Glass House Moutains, about a 600 foot ascent. The trail started out easy, with some switchbacks and a few stairs, but soon turned into a tough scramble up some treacherous rocks and roots that barely looked like a trail. It felt like quite an accomplishment to get to the top, one of those things that I still look back on and think "I can't believe that we actually did that!" It was a little unnerving at the top, because there wasn't much room to move around, and the wind was whipping around pretty good. We took a minute to enjoy the views and then scrambled back down to the car.

Next, we went to Steve Irwin's Australia Zoo, where we had lunch and some ice cream ($9.60 for a sundae!). We listened to a presentation about koalas while we ate, and I'm pretty sure they said that Eleanor Roosevelt came to Australia in the late 1800s, loved koalas, made a stuffed one, and named it after her husband Teddy, and that's how they came to be mistakenly called "koala bears." Don't quote me on that, though. (And yes, we knew that wasn't right - presumably which Roosevelt was married to who is a fine point of American history that didn't quite make it halfway around the world intact.)

The zoo was really cool. It was simple, with lots of room for the animals, but not so big that it was daunting to try to see everything. It was also very hands-on: we got to pet a couple of different koalas and a bunch of kangaroos, and could've also fed an elephant and petted a wombat if we'd been a bit earlier. There were tons of little lizards around, including one really bold one sunning itself on the back of an alligator. We also saw a dingo, and an echidna, and a bird called a jabiru that very helpfully posed with its sign. It was a good place to people watch, too - we saw a gaggle of American sorority girls, a pair of loud elderly British women, and various other characters. And we saw a "stick figures in self-inflicted peril" sign.

We watched the wild animal show, which featured snakes, birds, and a crocodile; it was mostly geared toward kids, but it was entertaining. The walkthrough aviary was nice, with lots of pretty birds and a keeper around to answer questions. Even better was watching the keepers interact with the tigers. They had 5 young tigers, 4 and 5 years old, and the keepers were constantly in the cage playing with them - wrestling with them, teasing them, putting sunglasses on them, just like you'd play with a (giant) regular cat. The tigers seemed to love it, and I've never seen anything like it.

We saw lots of wombats, which was awesome - I love wombats. They were active and running around their enclosures, and seemed to have personalities. One resisted the zookeeper's efforts to get some sort of sample from her, and another (the petting wombat, I think) was on a leash and completely refusing to do what the zookeeper wanted.

By this point, it was clear we weren't going to make it through everything on our itinerary, but we wanted to hit a couple more things. We drove on some ridiculously hilly roads to the Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve, which had a lovely (but hazy) lookout on the Glass House Mountains. Then we drove to Mapleton Falls National Park as the sun was setting. The lookout didn't give a very good view of the falls, but the area was amazing, with palm trees of a sort that we'd never seen before. We walked a short loop trail that we hadn't planned on doing, and it turned out to be awesome - it wandered through cool palm trees, and birds were calling all around us. Plus, at one point I looked to my right into a hollow log and saw a giant frog staring back at me, and apparently screamed like a girl, if you believe Julie's version of the story.

It was getting late, so we drove back toward Brisbane on the M1. We got stuck in some construction traffic and had a hard time finding any restaurants that were open for dinner. We eventually found a mall, and had a lousy, expensive hamburger. Getting food that was good or reasonably priced was turning out to be a real challenge on this trip.

We ran around a bit looking for a drugstore - again, harder than it should have been as we missed a few turns and found a few stores that were closed, but eventually succeeded. Back at the hotel, my foot blister looked pretty nasty and hurt (it was logging a lot of miles), but didn't seem any worse.

To wrap up the day, the A/C in our hotel room was pouring water, so we turned it off, which resulted in a hot room, and an A/C unit that was pouring even more water. Shaking our heads at our hotel luck, we gave up and went to bed.

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Thursday, March 13th: Brisbane Area

Today got off to a bad start, as Julie woke up with a migraine. We started out with a low impact activity, and walked to the Roma Street Parkland, a beautiful landscaped park with unbelievable flowers, a tiny little frog that we noticed on the sidewalk, and some ibises. Then we headed back to the hotel to check out, and found that they'd charged us 85 cents for the call to the pizza place a couple of nights before, adding insult to injury (or bad pizza, anyway).

We drove up to the summit of Mt. Coot-tha, a mountain just out of town that offers a nice view of Brisbane (although it was a little bit hazy when we were there). At the summit, I had an encounter with a trick faucet in the men's room. As soon as I turned the handle, the faucet erupted at full force, splashing everywhere and quickly filling the sink to overflowing - and it wouldn't turn off. I pushed the handle in and turned, and the torrent of water slowed but then rusty black water started coming out from around the handle. When I released it, the water came back on at full force. I looked around to try to find either a hidden camera for a TV show, or somebody to go for help. Failing to find either, I just stood there and worked on the handle until I finally got the water to turn off. I think that qualifies me as a certified plumber in Australia.

Our plans for the day were fairly loose, so on a foolish whim, we followed a trail sign to the J.C. Slaughter Falls Trail. The trail was downhill through some woods that were pretty but boring. We did see some kookaburras along the way, which was the only good thing about the hike. My foot was killing me, and it was one of the most miserable hikes I could remember. Then we got to the bottom and realized that there was a parking area that would have saved us 2 hours of painful toil. Also, the falls were totally dry except for enough standing water to breed mosquitoes.

Trying to salvage our poor choice, we then followed the Aboriginal Art trail for more gratuitous hill climbing before dragging ourselves back up the pointless trail we had just come down. The Aboriginal Art consisted of piles of rocks stacked up in 1993, and some spraypainted hands and boomerangs. It was, let's say, a bit of a letdown.

Back in the car and driving down the mountain, we took one more chance and hiked a gold mine trail, which turned out to be pretty cool. We saw an old walkway and what was allegedly part of an old rail trestle, and saw the entrance to a gold mine that never produced anything. (Hey, after the Aboriginal Art trail, our standards were low.) We also saw a goanna by the trail on the way down, and walking around the picnic area as we were leaving. Giant lizards make everything better.

We drove on down the mountain to the Brisbane Botanic Gardens and tried to have lunch, but it was really too hot to eat. We also had our first encounter with the Australian version of a milkshake, which is really just chocolate milk, and not nearly as refreshing as I'd hoped. The gardens themselves were very nice. They had some cool bonsai trees and a nice Japanese garden, some interesting ferns, more giant lizards, and a rainforest area that we got lost in because the map was nigh-impossible to follow.

We eventually found our way out of the gardens and then sat in rush hour traffic on the way to the airport. We did a U-turn to get to a gas station, where we had to wait in line for a pump. Thankfully, the rental car return went smoothly, but when we tried to check in for our flight (in the eerily deserted airport terminal), we discovered that we had gone to the international terminal (where we had landed a few days before), and that the domestic terminal was totally separate and distinct. We had to ride a train (the regular city to airport transit train) to the domestic terminal, at a cost of $4. (Qantas passengers ride for free, but us lowly Jetstar passengers had to pay.) I guess we got our money's worth, though - we got on the wrong train and rode one stop in the wrong direction, and then just missed the train going back to the airport because apparently you have to push a button to get the door to open so you can board. Nevertheless, we caught the next train and got to the correct airport with time to spare.

The check-in agent took mercy on us and didn't charge us for excess bags. Boarding went quickly because they used both the front and back doors of the plane to board - great idea - but by the time we were seated, the overheads were full. So the flight to Hobart, Tasmania, which was something like 3.5 hours, was long and uncomfortable with bags at our feet. We bought dinner on the plane for $10, and it was one of the cheaper and better meals we'd had to that point. Oddly, the hippie vegetarian Magic Apple place we'd eaten at in Burleigh Heads was spotlighted in a little blurb in the airline magazine. Who knew we were trendsetters?

We landed in Hobart around 9:30. The airport was small and easy to get around in, and we read all about rock snot and Tasmanian Sniffing Dogs whilst waiting for our bags. Picking up our rental car was typically long and involved, but we were eventually freed to drive into Hobart. The drive was odd - very rural for the first few miles before we got to the city. We crossed a cool bridge over the river, and found our hotel more easily than we expected. The hotel looked a little old and threadbare from the outside, but the service was good, the room was very nice and comfortable, and everything seemed to work as expected. I didn't learn any new trades, but it was the best hotel of the trip so far.

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