Our drive from Coolangatta to our motel in the North Brisbane suburbs was only around 90 minutes and we left in good time to get there late morning. Although our unit wasn’t ready, we were able to leave the car and hop on a bus into the city at a bus stop just around the corner. We chose this location as being well outside the CBD to avoid traffic and to avoid having to drive into town as there are good transport links with bus and train services nearby and a journey time of only 30 minutes or so into the CBD.

The location turned out to be very good. Getting from A to B was indeed a doddle but unfortunately the accommodation itself proved to be the worst we had stayed in so far. To be fair the rooms were as cheap as chips and of course you get what you pay for but the villas had thin walls and were poorly fitted out and lacking any proper heating system – and by now it’s getting chilly at night.

Brisbane is the capital of Queensland and Australia’s third biggest city with a population of 2.3M for the entire conurbation. It’s a very modern city but with some lovely old architecture too making it a very pleasant place to visit with all thats going on here.

Our bus took us into the busy Cultural Centre Busway Station around noon. The bus station is so named as it’s adjacent to several significant cultural buildings such as the Museum and Science Centre, the Performing Arts Centre and Queensland Art Gallery. It’s also close to the attractive South Bank area full of bars, restaurants and leisure facilities.

We headed off from the bus station to cross the river but just as we were doing so were distracted by loud music coming from the South Bank. We wandered down to take a look and found a huge crowd of lycra-clad women of all ages ,shapes and sizes exercising in front of a stage to music and the instructions of a fitness instructor. We discovered that this was part of a series of free fitness classes courtesy of Medibank taking place over a period of months. It all looked like good fun but of course we weren’t dressed for it!

We re-traced our steps back to the Victoria Bridge to cross over the Brisbane River and the CBD first hitting Queen Street mall which is a lively pedestrian shopping area full of every type of shop, department stores, bars and restaurants. A great place to shop, eat or just hang around with a coffee to people-watch.

We did a quick tour of the mall until we found ourselves at the Pig ‘N’ Whistle pub in the very pleasant Riverside area. We stopped for a drink and ended up having lunch in this English-style pub where a signed and framed shirt of the famous England goalkeeper Joe Hart proudly hangs on a wall! We continued our wanderings after lunch and eventually, after booking seats to see Dirty Dancing at QPAC the following evening, we made our way back to our motel for around 7PM.

The following morning, Sunday May 31st, we made an early start into the city to do some more sightseeing before meeting up for drinks and lunch with an old friend Pete Critchley and his lovely wife Ginnine who emigrated to Brisbane five years ago.

We had a super afternoon full of nostalgia. A few scoops at Riverside first and then over on the Southbank where we were treated to an excellent lunch. We then had to say our goodbyes as Ann and I went on to the theatre to catch a very average production of Dirty Dancing.

On Monday we continued our sightseeing, walking miles from one end of the city to the other. By the end of the day we felt we had pretty much seen what we wanted to see and decided to move on the next day, a day earlier than we had planned.

A few more random snaps of Melbourne:

Our decision to move on wasn’t a difficult one given the evenings were now starting to get chilly and we didn’t relish the idea of another couple of cold nights at the motel. We tried to add an extra day to our forthcoming  booking at Noosa which was our next destination but there was no availability and so we ended up booking a night in a  motel, the Beachcomber, at Perigean Beach a small town just a few km south of Noosa.

So Tuesday morning, June 2nd, we checked out and drove the short distance from North Brisbane to Perigean Beach. The accommodation at Beachcomber was excellent. We arrived not long after noon and walked into town hoping to find somewhere for a late lunch. In the event we were now twixt lunch and dinner and most eateries were closed until 5.30 or 6.00 so we settled for a couple of drinks in the Beach Hotel and decided to order a pizza delivery later in the evening. The pizza, from Zachary’s Gourmet Pizza Bar, was delicious.

The next morning we would drive to Noosa.

We returned to Australia on a late evening flight to Sydney on May 21st arriving early on the 23rd to resume our journey north up the East coast. We caught on onward flight to the Gold Coast Airport which is just outside Coolangatta and very handily placed for our accommodation in Coolangatta itself a couple of KM away. A courtesy bus picked us up at the airport and we were in our room by noon.

Our accommodation here was a timeshare apartment at Beach House Resort. There is a lot of timeshare on the Gold Coast which is very much a holiday coast comprised of a 35KM string of beach resorts stretching from Coolangatta on the New South Wales/Queensland border in the South up to Southport, South of Brisbane in the North.

This Gold Coast is Australia’s “Party central” with Surfers Paradise being the capital. The coast is intensively developed with sky scrapers presenting a very distinctive and striking coastline and whilst surf and water sports are a major attraction, there are also theme parks, zoos, casinos, Sea World and all manner of man made attractions to keep the punters busy. It’s certainly not everyone’s cup of tea and isn’t ours and so whilst we wanted to have a taste of it or at least see it, we had opted to stay in Coolangatta which gets a justifiably good write up as a quieter, family-friendly town.

Inland from the coast are of some of Queensland’s most beautiful National Parks and so there were opportunities for sightseeing away from the busy coastal fringe.

The Beach House Resort comprises a multi-storey hotel type property with a nice pool and other leisure facilities and a bar but no restaurant. The resort is a front line beach resort separated from the beach by a road and it shares the ground floor of the building with a variety of restaurants with a very handy underground car park which is free to residents.

Our room was a 2 bedroom, 10th floor apartment on the end of the building with views on 2 sides over a side street on one side and the beach on the other. The room was nicely furnished and very well kitted out with everything we could possibly need. This is definitely one of the best timeshares we have used.

The beaches here are fantastic and the weather was sunny and hot and we spent the remainder of our first day walking the beach, getting the lie of the town and planning our activities for the week ahead. After a very long journey, the second within 14 days, we were feeling the effects and were well and truly shattered. After an excellent Malaysian dinner, an early night was called for and we were in bed by ten.

The following morning, Sunday, still feeling less than 100%, we walked the 2km or so to Apex Car Hire to pick up our chariot for the next several weeks. We had used Apex in New Zealand and had found them to be excellent with very quick and positive responses to any email queries we sent them. We had no qualms with continuing with them in Australia although the fact they are relatively new to Oz with a younger fleet of vehicles meant I would be driving an automatic rather than a manual. No worries, they did us a great deal on an almost new Mitsubishi 4WD which was a pleasure to drive. After half an hour driving the streets of Coolangatta to get used to the automatic, we parked up at the hotel. The car didn’t move again until we left Coolangatta five days later.

After parking the car up we went to buy SIM cards for phone and iPad and then lunched at the Hogs Breath restaurant. By 2pm we were shattered again. We picked up some bits and pieces of groceries at Woolworths Supermarket which was conveniently only two minutes walk from the apartment and then returned to the apartment and bed.

Unfortunately Ann had been fighting flu since our flight back to Manchester and fatigued from the travelling she finally succumbed to it and remained stuck in bed for the best part of another two days until Tuesday. On Monday afternoon, just as Ann was beginning to recover, I went down with the same bug myself and spent most of Tuesday and Wednesday morning in bed. Thankfully by Wednesday afternoon I was on the mend and fit enough to take a stroll along the seafront South to the next beach, Kirra Beach where we found a number of fishermen who had just hauled in a huge catch of mullet and were just setting about sorting the catch and packing the fish into boxes. The fishermen apparently wait until a shoal of fish is spotted from a vantage point on shore and then a net is taken out to encircle them and then pulled in using trucks and jeeps. This type of fishing is done under licence in only 2 places in Queensland.

With 3 days of our week in Coolangatta pretty much written off, we fortunately recovered sufficiently by Thursday to take a trip to see some of the hinterland on an organised tour to Lamington National Park and Tambourine Mountain that we had booked via the Beach House when we first arrived.

On Thursday morning at 7am we were picked up for our tour by a Scenic Tours minibus driven by a Kiwi driver, Tom, who like most of our drivers thus far was a very affable and humorous gentleman with tonnes of knowledge and information to share.

Our experience of organised trips so far, both in New Zealand and OZ was that these were worth the expense (none of them are cheap!). Invariably we were travelling through stunning scenery often in mountainous areas with narrow winding roads with continual ups and downs and as a driver needing to concentrate 100%, you don’t get to see too much. In addition, the drivers of these tours were, without exception, very experienced drivers like Tom, who provided a running commentary throughout the journey to give us a much better appreciation of what we were seeing – the landscape itself, the fauna and flora and the history of the places we drove through and visited.

Not only that but the general conversations that take place give you a much better insight on life in the areas – the good and the bad. And finally, these trips present opportunities to chat with fellow travellers who are invariably a mix of locals and international travellers.

As usual we considered our Scenic Tour to be money well spent. We were part of a group of only 8 or 9 passengers with one Australian and the remainder Chinese, Singaporean and Indian and all good for a natter. A good day was had by all.

Photos from our Lamington National Park and Tambourine Mountain 

Lamington National Park was declared a National Park 4 years after the O’Reilly family took over the land in 1911. It was declared a World Heritage Site in 1994 because of its’ high biodiversity in terms of its flora with various types of forest ranging from beech forest to tropical rainforest to dry eucalypt forest. There are walking tracks and and a treetop walk and lots to see and do over a day or longer if you wish to stay – there are holiday cottages for rent.

There’s a fascinating history of this place and the O’Reilly family including a gripping story about Bernard O’Reilly and the Stinson airplane crash of 1937. There’s a book telling the story of this crash and a dramatic rescue but a shorter version can be found on O’Reilly’s website.

After Lamington we headed over to Tambourine Mountain, a very pleasant and affluent little town with some nice shops, restaurants, microbrewery and a winery. We didn’t get to visit the brewery but did enjoy an excellent lunch at Masala Shanti.

Our final day in Coolangatta, Friday, was a chill out day spent walking areas we hadn’t managed to see before including some beautiful beaches South of the resort at Tweed Heads where a piece of sculpture marks the border between New South Wales and Queensland.

As we were about to leave Coolangatta the town was getting busy with seemingly hundreds of folk setting up Marquees and shelters and stages in readiness for a 50s and 60s music festival which was to start the next day and so sadly we missed it.

We left Coolangatta on Saturday 30th May. The week had been decimated by our flu virus but nevertheless we had probably seen most of what it had to offer. We liked the place very much and wouldn’t hesitate to visit again.

We flew into Sydney on the morning ot May 5^th. We were quickly through immigration, collected our bags and found a shuttle service to take us to our hotel, the Bayswater, in the (in)famous Kings Cross area of the city.

Kings Cross is a great location for getting around the city if you are not staying in one of the more central and expensive hotels. It’s an easy half hour walk downtown but there are bus stops and a taxi rank virtually outside the door of the hotel and a train station within 100 metres. The area is certainly busy with lots of nightlife and has something of a reputation as a red light area but we didn’t notice anything that you wouldn’t see in any inner city area. The Bayswater hotel itself is of the budget variety but has been refurbished and was good with friendly helpful staff and a great little coffee shop serving breakfast next door. We were checked in and ready to go by noon and as it was a lovely day we decided to walk into town.

This was Tuesday and we would fly home on Friday. We had already booked a trip to the Blue Mountains for Thursday leaving us just two and a half days for sight seeing but we managed to see quite a lot in such a short time.

First stop had to be Sydney Harbour which was fantastic on such a hot sunny day. Inevitably the place was busy with tourists but not madly so and the place is easy enough to find your way around. We walked around the harbour area and the CBD for miles and whilst we had planned a decent restaurant for a late lunch/early dinner, we ended up having a pizza down by the harbour mid afternoon. Well and truly knackered we were in bed by 10.30.

Sydney Harbour by day

And by night

The next day we were up bright and early and jumped on a hop-on/hop-off double decker city tour bus with taped commentary which was very good. We bought a ticket combining the bus tour with a Sydney Harbour cruise the next day. I can’t remember the cost but it was pretty reasonable and I seem to recall I got an old person’s discount…

A few street scenes are shown below:

 

Bondi Beach

After our bus tour of the city we grabbed a sandwich and drink for lunch and got on another bus to Bondi Beach, a ride of over half an hour.

Bondi is world famous and an obvious must do when visiting Sydney but it wasn’t quite what we were expecting. It isn’t as big as we imagined and whilst it has some interesting street art (like that above) and lovely white sand and is pretty enough, we were a bit underwhelmed. That said it’s very popular with Sydneysiders and tourists alike and there’s lots going on with people enjoying the sand, surfers (obviously), dog walkers and joggers and people just sat around enjoying a coffee or families with picnics.

There’s a very obvious beach culture here and on a lovely day such as this it has a great vibe. Whilst we didn’t fall in love with the place it would be a nice place to spend a day doing nothing much other than people watching which is very entertaining here. However, with places to go and things to see we spent only an hour or so at Bondi before we caught a bus back to Sydney to walk about some more before we walked back to the hotel.

Dinner on Tuesday was pub grub in a pub almost opposite the hotel. Food was fine but the beer selection was disappointing after what we had become used to in New Zealand – this was to become a recurring theme…

On Wednesday, our last full day in Sydney itself, we walked into town to take the harbour cruise and upon our return caught a ferry to Darling Harbour which is just outside the city centre. Darling Harbour is a big pedestrianised area totally devoted to retail, restaurants, bars and entertainment generally. It’s pretty cool.

A very enjoyable day which we ended with a Spanish tapas meal with a nice bottle of red and an early night ready for our Blue Mountain Tour the following day.

Sydney Harbour Cruise and Darling Harbour

Darling Harbour

Blue Mountains

To be continued…

Given the terrible news about Brian, we were anxious to get home to the family as soon as possible. At this point we had lost our enthusiasm for travel and indeed for this trip and we just wanted to get back but were struggling to find early flights back. We had an anxious few days but in the event the funeral was delayed until May 12 and this enabled us to find flights to get us back in time. Given this delay, with flights and hotels long booked, we decided we would continue with our flight to Australia.

We had booked 4 nights in Melbourne and 5 in Sydney. Our Sydney visit would be cut to three nights.

We left Auckland for Melbourne on Friday 1^st May and landed Melbourne Airport about 5pm. We quickly found a shuttle bus into the city and got there in darkness about 6pm. The Express Shuttle provides a bus ride into the city centre and then a cab to your hotel but the rush hour traffic in the city was horrendous. Thankfully the Travelodge was only a short distance and so we made our own way to the hotel on foot.

We had chosen to stay at Travelodge as it was only a short walk into the centre itself and was also well placed for transport connections with the main bus/train station, including a free city tram service, within a 5 minute walk. It was also a reasonable room price and the room was fine.

Having checked in and dropped our bags, we wandered out to find something to eat but unfortunately, although the hotel is only a short walk to the centre, it was in a fairly quiet location and we struggled to find our bearings to get us into the centre proper. In the event we found a decent pub for a couple of beers and then found a street full of asian restaurants, just what we were hoping for. Eventually we plumped for Korean for the simple reason that Ann had never eaten Korean food.

The restaurant was packed with young Koreans with an average age probably of around twenty -we were the only non Koreans in the place. Not only that but virtually every other diner was female and enjoying a good night out in various stages of intoxication and giddiness. It was all a bit surreal but it was all good fun and we had a very pleasant dinner and an amusing hour or so talking with the young Korean staff keen for us to include their home land on our tour.

With four nights booked in Melbourne we effectively had three full days to see the city but we had already booked a highly recommended day tour to the Great Ocean Road which left us only two days.

We packed a lot into our first day, starting with a bus tour around the city followed by a cruise down the Yarra River. The weather was cloudy but warm and the city was packed with people doing their thing. This city and Australia in general is sport mad and there seemed to be sports events of one kind or another throughout the city and throughout the weekend with whole families dressed in their teams colours wandering around pre and post match. It makes for a fantastic atmosphere.

Federation Square

The Federation Square area is the main hub in the city centre area. It’s a big area with lots of open space including a Plaza with a giant screen used to broadcast major sports events. It includes bars and restaurants and is bounded on one side by the Yarra River. There’s a nice mix of old and new architecture including the iconic Flinders Street Station, St Paul’s Cathedral and the modernistic and angular National Gallery of Victoria with its Atrium entrance off Flinders Street. There’s also a Visitor Centre here. This is a great area with a lot of stuff to see and we spent a few hours around here.

Riverside

The Yarra River runs through the city and is well developed for recreation with a trail running alongside it for walkers, runners and cyclists. The riverside is lined with restaurants and bars in the central area and on the day we visited there was lots going on with street entertainers and events and activities of one kind or another taking place. The river itself was alive with ferries and other watercraft and one could easily spend a day on the river walking and sitting and watching the world go by – but sadly we didn’t have time on this occasion.

Late Saturday afternoon saw us catch a bus to suburban Melbourne to meet up with old friend Mark Potter his lovely partner Jess and their baby Eve for an evening of beer, curry and nostalgia, reminiscing about the old days in Manchester. It was great to see you and yours Mark – hope we can do it again some time in the not too distant…

On Sunday, with a better idea of the layout of the city, we spent a leisurely day wandering around looking at some of the places we hadn’t got to visit the previous day. That evening we had hoped to dine at Movida but couldn’t get a table. In the event we ended the afternoon in China Town with an excellent dinner before an early night in readiness for a long day on the Tour the next day.

Street Art – The Lanes

This area is just off Flinders Street and is a much recommended “attraction” consisting of legal graffiti. Just a few of the works are shown below

The next day, Monday 4th May, would be our last day in Victoria and we would spend it on a very long day trip on the Great Ocean Road. We were blessed with a lovely sunny day although it became cloudy after lunch which didn’t help with the photos.Neverthelss this turned out to be a highlight of our trip. It was certainly a long day but plenty of stops for comfort breaks and lunch made it more than bareable.Nevertheless, if we get chance to visit this area again we would like to do this trip with a car over 2 or 3 days.

The Great Ocean Road

 

We were impressed with Melbourne which is currently Australia’s second biggest city but growing rapidly and apparently destined to become the biggest within a few years. We had read that 3 or 4 days here would be more than enough for a visit but there’s a lot to see and its definitely a city we would love to re-visit to see more if we get chance.