We arrived in Brisbane on Tuesday the 18th, stop 6 in Australia, just as cyclone Marcia was building. While Brisbane is not right on the coast, it is close enough for the forecast to call for rain the first 5 days of our stay. Cyclone Marcia was a category 5 by the time it struck about 200 miles north of Brisbane. It did lots of damage up there but we only got the rain and some wind.

We bravely booked a bicycle tour for day one and luckily it was mostly rain free. Apparently we are braver than most as it turned out to be a private tour. The city is built along both sides of the very twisty Brisbane River. The tour focused on the areas along the river rather than inside the CBD which made riding much nicer starting with the man-made beach/pool (with chlorinated water) they built as the heart of South Bank. We had read it was designed to keep citizens out of the bull shark infested river. True story the guide claims. Apparently years ago before all the bridges were built they ran a ferry service. The ferry's didn’t allow pets so the people would have them swim across behind the ferry and occasionally they would get snatched by a shark. Supposedly even a horse was attacked.

We rode through the arts district, Kangaroo Point (still no live kangaroos ), the City Botanic Gardens and into what was called the best neighborhood in Brisbane. Multi-million dollar homes that would not even have been considered very nice by Dallas standards. Our guide gave us some good tips, one of which was where to find the dollar movie theater. In typical Aussie fashion, the cheapie shows were $6.50 each (still a big improvement over $18 - $23 each). Over the next few rainy days, this tip alone paid for the tour, as we caught up on current movies and saw The Gambler, The Imitation Game, and The 2nd Best Marigold Hotel (all excellent).

We went back to the Botanic gardens a couple of times in the rain to feed my flower photo obsession and we spent some time in the Science Museum. Although we had been told the modern art museum was great, Bill had had enough of modern 'art’. By Saturday the sun finally came out and we headed to the South Bank beach. It was packed and quite hot and steamy, so after a couple of hours we rinsed off at the public showers and went to eat what passes for Mexican food here. The food comes close, but the salsa does not. It’s more pico and not even really that. For dessert we went to The Bald Man's chocolate shop for fondue. Yum! Bill was disappointed, no discount for bald guys.

Since our bike tour was outside the CBD, we took a free walking tour of the city offered by the visitors center. We toured the city hall which also houses the Brisbane Museum, a performance hall and a small tea room. The tea room was very popular in the early 1900’s but had to be torn down for a new development. The plan was to re-build it after the new construction was done but it didn’t happen so they made space in the city hall to reconstruct it. It was quite cool and the pastries (which Dessa couldn’t resist) were excellent. The tour then stopped at the original state treasury building. It is now a 5 star hotel and casino (so they are still printing money).

Our guide explained that Brisbane was originally developed to handle the expansion needed as Sydney started to grow. In order to build, they conscripted the repeat offenders from Sydney. So Sydney was built by the criminals kicked out of Great Britain and the worst of those were sent to build Brisbane. It wasn’t all that surprising then when our guide told the story of Patrick Mayne, one of the wealthiest citizens in Brisbane history. Patrick was a poor Irish slaughterman who had recently arrived in Brisbane when he apparently met Robert Cox, a lumberman, in a bar one night. Robert began bragging about the amount of money he had on him now that he had finally been paid his salary for working in the outback for several years (maybe not his smartest decision). The next day parts of him were found in the river. Patrick quietly left town and someone else was convicted of Robert’s murder. A year later, Patrick came back to Brisbane and started to build his real estate empire. On his deathbed (15 years after that), Patrick admitted to killing Robert. This taint on his philanthropy kept the University of Queensland (and a few other places) from acknowledging his donations until the mid 1960’s (of course it didn’t keep them from taking his money).

We had another good hotel, Punthill Apartments, close to the CBD. It was a studio, with a kitchen minus an oven and it had nice patio facing the city. So far all those hours of searching hotels.com have paid off (thank you Dessa). The main downtown area, the Queen Street Mall, was nearby with plenty of shopping, groceries, and restaurants. The city has good public transportation with a convenient debit card system. We rode train, the ferry and the bus to reach the farther parts of the city. Brisbane also had a free city bus loop but it didn’t really help us much. All were very nice.

Just like the other cities we visited, Brisbane is designed to attract and appeal to the citizens and to encourage them to get outside. Lovely parks, miles of wide shady walkways along the waterfront, bicycle friendly, with free cultural venues. It is much more extensive and nicer than The Riverwalk in San Antonio. Almost all of the restaurants, coffee shops and bars offer outside seating. So far this has been our favorite of all the cities we have visited. It would be a great place to live, if it wasn't so expensive.

Apparently festivals are fairly continuous in this country as there has been some type of festival going on in each city we visited while we were there (either that or we are just really lucky). In Brisbane, it was the annual Comedy Festival, so we caught two shows at the Brisbane Powerhouse. Originally it actually was a power generating station for the riverside warehouse district but it is now a theater venue set amongst parklands and warehouse condo conversions. A very beautiful area. We saw Hannah Gadsby and Chris Wainwright. Chris was definitely the better of the two.

The first night we were walking around, Bill noticed what he thought large bats flying across the river. At the science center we discovered that they are called Black Flying Foxes. They have a 2-3 foot wingspan but look exactly like a giant bat. The Australians don’t like them as they carry some sort of disease that kills other animals (domesticated and wild) and has actually killed a few people. After that first night we saw dozens of them every time we were out at dusk. We tried pretty unsuccessfully to take a picture, they were too high up and moving too fast.

Now that the rain had stopped, it got hot and very humid so we looked for some more indoor activities (we’re not complaining too much as we have seen on the news the kind of winter you guys are suffering through). We went back to City Hall to go up the clock tower and explore the Brisbane Museum. The museum had recently opened up a fantastic exhibit of Hollywood costumes that are owned by another one of Brisbane's wealthy citizens (he’s a lawyer – so mostly likely a crook as well J ). It must have had 60-70 costumes complete with photographs of the actors and actresses in the costumes. Some displays had clips of the movies where the actors were actually wearing the costumes. They were from the Golden age of cinema (pre 1960’s) and I was surprised about the number of the actors and movies Bill knew (he blamed his mother and Sunday afternoon family movie day).

Near our hotel was Roma Park, which turned out to be much better than the Botanical Gardens. There were tons of water dragons, several nice water features, flowers of course, parrots, an Aussie possum that took apple from my hand, and thousands of very large spiders. There were so many over-head along some paths that we were afraid about walking down them (Australia is home to 8 or so of the top ten most poisonous spiders so being concerned was simply common sense). It was like something out of a horror movie. We only had my camera when we went there and Bill was very patient while I took about 300 pictures. A couple of days later we went back and both of us took another 300 photos each. It was awesome.

We had gone to a couple of outdoor markets that were pretty small, but on our last day we went to the Eat Street Night Market. It is a market of mostly food and all of the vendors sell from shipping containers. There was live music and it was all lit up and it was jammed with people. Not cheap like in Thailand, but an amazing variety and really good.

We spent almost 2 weeks in Brisbane because we thought we would do some diving off the Gold Coast or the Sunshine Coast close to Brisbane. After Cyclone Marcia blew through we decided against diving since the water was all churned up. They also had bull shark warnings along the coast because the storm had chased them out of the river channels to the coast in the murky water. We are off to Cairns now where we will take our seven-day dive trip along the outer Great Barrier Reef. Hopefully this dive trip will go better than our diving plans in Port Phillip and Brisbane went. FYI...they still have not seen any great white sharks in Port Phillip.

As always, higher resolution photos are available on Flikr:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/bill_and_ dessa/sets/