better late than never

The posts I wrote last week but couldn't get off the laptop:


Aug. 20
Brisbane
A day of relaxation. It's an odd feature of traveling: you often need a break from the vacation. After two weeks traveling in Australia, combined with our travels the last month in New Zealand, it was time for a day off.
We ended up with a free place to stay for the first time in Australia. One of our former roommates from Wellington is from Brisbane, and we ended up staying here with his mom, who has served as a tour guide and host.
Today we took sight-seeing mostly off the agenda. Woke up and headed to a city park with barbecues for a brunch of lamb chops, eggs and grilled vegetables. Then a walk around the city botanic garden, mostly checking out local birds, and an afternoon of catching up on newspaper reading, TV watching, e-mail writing and blog postings.

Tomorrow, the travel gears up again. We catch a 7:45 a.m. bus north to Hervey Bay and Fraser Island, the world's largest sand island and apparently one of the scenic highlights of Australia's East Coast.

Aug. 19
A day to see Brisbane. Starting in the late morning, we hopped on a CityCat, a catamaran plying the Brisbane River for public transport needs. Far cheaper than the average river cruise, and it comes with benefits - for $3.60 each we get an all-day pass to the city's ferries, buses and trains. We get the most out of our money. After a walk around the arts center (stopping in the requisite museum) we ride the CityCat up the river to the end of the line and back. That takes up the afternoon, then we head out (with our host) to eat and people-watch on the sidewalk of the nightlife district. Evening concludes with a show - a string quartet performing rock covers and a few originals. The bio says "we're an independent rock band that just happens to be a string quartet." The originals lean more toward lounge blues, but the rock covers produce the appropriate chaos of noise.

Aug. 18
Leave Surfer's Paradise at noon and bus two hours to Brisbane (morning taken up with napping on the beach after dropping the bags at the bus station).
We've phoned ahead - we're staying with the mother of one of our friends from Wellington. First, we have to kill the afternoon in Brisbane. I walk around downtown and end up in a small museum. Kirsten's time is spent talking to travel agents. She's contemplating returning home, as her dad has some health issues. (In the end she decides on Saturday to scrap the idea, for now).
Our host, Jane, fills the evening playing tour guide. She drives us to all the city sights, including a night view of the Brisbane lights from a mountain lookout. Cities always look good from a high night vantage point, and no exception here.

Aug. 17
Bryon Bay to Surfer's Paradise
Surfer's Paradise isn't. There's a long, gold-sand beach, but it's certainly not a special beach in this country of special beaches. There's also not a particularly good surf.
What there is, is property developers. Glass and steel high-rise condo and apartment buildings, loads of retail shops and restaurants. LIke the worst parts of Florida. Even ran across a run-down amusement park in the middle of it all, the kind of gaudy attraction the Mississippi beaches were littered with. A few amusement-park rides, a free-fall swing, mini-golf, all on a concrete lot sprinkled with dirty astroturf and signs screaming out about the thrills you'll have.

Aug. 16
Bryon Bay
A horrible winter's day.
Well, an Australian winter's day, anyway. Must be about 75 degrees, sunny, with a bright blue sky and we're hanging out on the beach.
It was a bit of a late start today. Met up with some Irish friends we'd met in New Zealand, and one thing led to another until it became early in the morning. So today didn't happen until sometime after lunch. When it did, it was quite nice.
A couple hours on the beach soaking in the winter sun, which feels more like summer than New Zealand ever did.
After the beach, we continued on the theme of being slightly late. Headed out to a nearby town we'd read had a spot to view platypus. The town wasn't quite as nearby as we'd thought, and the Lonely Planet guidebook's one-sentence description of the site wasn't as helpful as we'd expected. Asking around at gas stations got us to the pond, but not until the last of the twilight had disappeared.
We looked down into the black water anyway, glimpsed a darker shape and heard a splash. So I heard a platypus. And you can't prove otherwise.
We got back in the car and figured we were halfway to Nimbin, so we might as well see the town.
Nimbin is a bit of an oddity. It's a tiny place, with barely a block's worth of shops, and it's well off the main road. Yet every backpacking tourist takes a day trip to the place. Its appeal is based entirely on its reputation as a town where marijuana laws are unenforced and hippies roam the streets. Hard to tell if the reputation is deserved, by the time we get there (7 p.m., but after nightfall) the streets are deserted. Apparently it's a tourist destination only because of the amount of tourists.

Aug. 15
The bus leaves Sydney at 7 a.m. and doesn't stop in Byron Bay until 8:30 p.m. We're on this bus because we're trying to meet some friends.
A long bus trip, like a long plane ride, places you in a bubble outside reality. Once you sit down your only responsibility, deciding on a destination, has already occurred. During the trip you can't do anything of consequence. You're disconnected from the world. I kind of like the feeling, as long as I've got a book to read or music to listen to or some sort of entertainment to keep me out of my own head and kill the time.

Aug. 14
Sydney - Bondi Beach and the coastline
We head out to the famous Bondi. It deserves the hype - the beach isn't huge, but is still a 15-20 minute walk from one end to the other in the sand. It definitely has the scenic bit down, with the bright sand and blue water curving into the fashionable houses and shops.
The part I can't get over, however, is the crowd. It's a Monday afternoon in what would be February in the rest of the world, and there are people everywhere. The sun is shining but a bit of the warmth is taken off by a breeze. There are some folks in jackets and long sleeves, but most in shorts and sandals or bikinis.
We walk for about two hours south along the coast, a route taking us from the beach along rocks and cliffs, then to another small beach, then the pattern repeats. We walk until the sun sets, then realize we don't know how to get back short of retracing our steps. There's not enough warmth or food for that option, but we end up stumbling on a bus line that works.

The evening is spent deciding whether to buy a bus pass or a train pass for the rest of the trip, since we want to leave Sydney tomorrow. This is a decision Kirsten feels should have been made earlier. It highlights a basic difference in our preferred modes of travel: I like a loose outline of destinations, with few actual details planned out in advance and just taking it as it goes. Kirsten would prefer having a slightly more detailed outline in advance. My approach generally wins out by default, which suits me fine but occasionally leads to frustration in my travel partner.