We arrived into Brisbane early evening and after stepping out of the airport and soon became apparent that the rain jackets would be needed for the forseeable! Fortunately Mitcho and his girlfriend Jane came to meet us in the Ute but even in the short distance from arrivals to ute we'd managed to get a bit wet on the bottom half. This rain was serious and relentless. We grabbed an awesome pizza with Mitch and Jane before getting dropped at City Backpackers.

Was a big place on a hill just (importantly...) just on the edge of town with a great view of the river (useful...) from its swimming pool decking area. In the morning we met Mitch and had a river side tour while grabbing a coffee where all the locals cyclists generally meet, todays weather meant that Mitch was the only cyclist today sporting his new fixed gear bike.

In the afternoon we had a look round the city then the art gallery and saw some a pretty cool surf exhibition, we then followed this by a free internet session at the very efficient and impressive library. We met with Mitch again in the evening for a night-time tour of his new rowing club house followed by a superb Vietnamese and our first encounter with posums which were making their way along the telephone lines above us and moving on to the next house.

Tomorrows plan would be to either head north to Noosa or south to Byron. We woke up to rain gushing down our street like a small river. Roads north and south were cut and the news was reporting major flash flooding in Tawoomba and that the Brisbane river was flooding with more to come and the potential for the damn now at 150% capacity to busrt, if that happened, then this blog and us would be no more along with a few hundred thousand others.

We were now considering our escape plan amid rumours that the roads to the airport would be cut, our road outside was still passable although the shops had now been emptied due to panick buying and Mitch had now been cut off from us, only down the road. We stayed in all day keeping safe from a potential inland tsunami as seen in Tawoomba and getting cut off from our hostel. I ended the day with a night time dip in our well placed pool with Dr Dave while we looked over the flooding river below us.

The morning came and the news hadn't improved, infact a new computer model of where the floods were predicted to hit made it clear it was time for us to make our move, combined with the fact that the dam had reached 170% capacity. We quickly packed our bags and ran to the train station in hope they were still running to the airport. Fortunately there was still one going each hour. We were at the airport and had overcome the first obstacle. The next was to get a flight while the place was still operating. We were ready to set up camp and wait a couple of days but fortunately with a very nice Qantas lady whose house was currently being flooded engineered a flight out to Sydney then Christchurch in 5 hours time. A delay from Brisbane made it a quick dash to the next flight where we boarded with the South African Paralympic team. We thought all the drama was now over only to find out that our luggage had not made with with us t Christchurch...