As you drive into Brisbane and follow a line of coaches up a dreary looking circular ramp into the Transit Centre, it's easy to wake up after a long journey, look out of the window at the featureless grey walls passing by and draw a hasty conclusion, as I did, that you're entering just another dismal city of square office blocks and grid-system roads. The Brisbane Transit Centre, which is about as much as I managed to see of the city the last time I was here, appears on arrival to be a multi-storey car park for coaches with a split level lounge and waiting area placed on top as an afterthought - from the outside, it certainly isn't designed to give the impression of a gateway into a vibrant modern city. Once you disembark from your coach and go inside, however, it suddenly seems as though you might have to think again.

The centre comprises almost an entire city block and the lounge provides everything a tired traveller could possibly want while waiting for a connection - shops, fast food restaurants, an internet cafe, arcade machines, rest areas and televisions. In fact, if you travel down on the escalator below the two waiting levels, you'll find an entire food court and shopping centre. Anyone familiar with dingy coach stations elsewhere would almost certainly be slightly taken aback by the Brisbane Transit Centre - it's more like an airport than a glorified bus stop, complete with a separate level for arrivals and departures, monitors hanging from the ceiling with estimated times for all incoming and outgoing coaches, and ongoing announcements telling you when your coach is ready for boarding and through which gate you should go to find it! Believe it or not, you're even expected to check your bags in on arrival and have them weighed. Presumably, this is to make sure that the coach doesn't suddenly tip over at high speed through the combined weight of luggage in the hold - something which we all know is a real problem everywhere else in the world. There's that sarcasm again, did you get that? Only after your luggage has been checked, ticketed and taken away from you, and you've been subjected to questions about whether or not you packed your bags yourself as though you're getting on an international flight wearing a Tee-Shirt on which is written "Terrorists do it at 30,000 feet", can you think about going and getting a cup of tea and waiting for your, um, flight to be called. It's all quite surreal, terribly bureaucratic, and almost certainly totally un-necessary. It does, however, add something to the whole travelling experience in Australia. Also, of course, some people might miss the opportunity to give somebody a chance to lose their luggage for them, and at least this way you don't actually get to see your bags being loaded onto the bus. Adds to the excitement.

It was fairly late when we arrived, and after collecting our bags we stopped for a bite to eat from the food court. There really wasn't much open at that time of night and the people serving at the remaining fast food outlets really didn't look as though they wanted to be there. Eloise, being a vegetarian, got to pig out on something delicious from the veggie stand while I, unfortunately, had to be served by the only person still on duty at Kentucky Fried Chicken who was doubling as cashier and chef and was clearly unfamiliar with the art of cooking a chicken so that it didn't taste like a sock. Then, with Eloise going on about how full she was and me mumbling under my breath about humane methods of execution for fast food chefs, we set about trying to locate our hotel.

As we were essentially just passing through on our way north, I had booked us into somewhere which looked as though it would be comfortable for a couple of days rather than being particularly over the top. Nevertheless, it turned out that we were staying just about opposite the City Botanical Gardens and only a couple of blocks from the shopping district - so we didn't have far to go to get to anything. Our hotel, in fact, turned out to be better than I had been expecting and was clearly meant for people passing through on business - it even came with free broadband internet access in the room. We had a separate bedroom and living area, and a distant view of the river over the Botanical gardens from our window. After our brief dabble into the youth hostel experience in Surfers Paradise, we had clearly gone up market again.Nevertheless, we had limited time in Brisbane so we just threw our suitcases in a corner and went to bed in order to get an early start in the morning exploring the city.

The central pedestrian mall on the junctions of Queen Street and Albert Street is the main shopping destination for Brisbanites. The city does a fairly good job of pretending to be a lot smaller than it is, and since we were staying quite close to the Queen Street Mall and spent most of our time in the general area, I actually came away with the impression that Brisbane isn't much more than a few relaxed city blocks containing a pleasant community square, the mall and the botanic gardens. Obviously, we didn't have a long stay in which to explore further, but it's only after getting home and looking on a map that I realise just how sprawling Brisbane and its suburbs really are. This small town illusion isn't a bad thing by any means, and is a good indication of just how "cosy" Australians manage to make their cities feel. Whereas Britain tends to cover its cities in concrete and ugly grey office blocks stretching up to the sky, and seems to love employing architects who seriously believe a building shaped like an aubergine to be a fantastic idea, Australia still very much goes for large open community spaces, lots of greenery and parkland, and long relaxing walks between different shopping areas. Of course, Australians do have a tendency to use the word "city" in the same way Americans do - referring to just about everything larger than a small car park - but Brisbane actually manages to be a well spread out metropolis and home to nearly two million people without actually giving the feel to a visitor of being more than a small community. I applaud this, and very much wish London was the same.

One of the most forward thinking innovations I saw in Brisbane while we were there was that the local government had installed free wireless internet hotspots around the Queen Street Mall. Anybody could just wander down to the shops with their laptop, sit on a bench anywhere along the street, and surf the internet. I don't suppose this is such a radical thing now that everybody has broadband at home and at the office - why would you take your laptop down the street when you can stay at home or plug in at the office without wasting the batteries - but it's small ideas like this which other countries seem unwilling to adopt and which set Australia apart.

While we were out, we decided to buy a phone card from the kiosk at the junction of the two main streets on the Brisbane mall - mainly because we would need to start phoning ahead for accommodation at any moment and being able to use a payphone in the street was going to be slightly more convenient than spending much of our remaining budget calling from our hotel room. To this day, I have no idea whether somebody made a mistake, or whether phone cards in Australia are just extraordinarily good value - but we certainly weren't short changed. I settled on a five dollar card, since there were options from various telecoms companies and I thought it might be best to start with a low value, see how long the card lasted, and perhaps go for a card from a different company later in the search for the best value. Well, I needn't have worried - the first time I put the card in a payphone and keyed in the handy six thousand digit security code printed on the reverse, I was welcomed by an automated Australian voice which told me chirpingly: "You have seven hundred and eighty six minutes of call time remaining on this card." I fully appreciate that this was an estimate and that it was probably based on the assumption that I would be making mostly local calls, but even after several weeks of using the card to call ahead and book rooms, and phoning home a couple of times, I was still being greeted by a cheery Australian lady telling me that I had many hundreds of minutes left. I still have it somewhere, although I expect it's expired by now. The first time you use a British phone card, all you usually get is a voice laughing at you and asking sarcastically if you seriously expect to be able to make an entire phone call for the mere ten pounds you paid for it!

My favourite destination in Brisbane is, by far, the City Botanical Gardens. Australia, as I have said previously, excels in maintaining its wide open spaces rather than covering them in office blocks, and seems to be just as good at maintaining them as genuine back to nature retreats in the midst of city life. Every major city in the country has a large area set aside as botanic gardens, and they are all justifiably proud of their own and keen to point out how much more spectacular they are than everyone else's! Now, I should point out here that neither Eloise or I are massive fans of the whole formal gardens thing - the idea that somebody has planted an area of grass several miles square and then dotted it with perfectly round flowerbeds connected with cute little cobbled paths seems to be a particularly British thing and rather makes us want to run screaming in the opposite direction. These places, it always seems to me whenever I'm forced to walk through one on my way somewhere, are mainly frequented by ladies in their eighties walking in pairs pointing at daffodils and saying "Oh look Mavis, isn't that lovely?" to each other at regular intervals. This is ironic as it's usually exactly these sorts of people who have trouble even getting out of bed in the morning without falling over, let alone being expected to walk around miles of labyrinthine pathways looking for pansies. I can't speak for Eloise, but personally my impression of city gardens was a bit clouded by this stereotype and I hadn't held up a lot of hope for the botanic gardens, so I have to say that I was very pleasantly surprised by the ones in Brisbane. I then went on to be even more pleasantly surprised to discover over the following weeks that the Australians seem to guard their natural habitats very closely and would generally rather have a pointed stick rammed up their bottom and be shot out of a cannon than allow anybody with a degree in architecture to go anywhere near them!

The City Botanic Gardens aren't, by any means, the largest in Australia. However, this less sprawling layout makes it easier to find your way around, use the gardens as a place to relax, and spend the day not having to wander around with a seventy page guidebook trying to work out where to go next as you do in some of the larger ones elsewhere. Entering from Alice Street, you find the sound of the city vanishing surprisingly quickly. A path leads off towards the central rotunda which clearly acts as a meeting point in the park, and to the right there is a large ornamental pond around which Ibis and Lizards wander looking for visitors to feed them. Of course, as in all these places, feeding the animals is not encouraged, but nevertheless people still crowd around the pond and sit on the surrounding benches handing out bread to anything that seems interested. Which is to say, every living creature in the park. I'd only just got through the gate, and already I felt as though I really wanted a place like this near to my home in England. The nearest thing I had in London at the time was a small featureless park with a small duck pond, usually filled with obnoxious teenagers (the park, not the pond - we haven't begun drowning our troublemakers yet) throwing litter on the grass, wiping their noses on their sleeves and saying "Innit" to each other at regular intervals for no apparent reason. I've since moved.

As with most botanical gardens in Australia, the park is divided into themed areas through which visitors can experience flora and fauna from different regions of the country. For example, a stroll along the path to the north of the gardens allows you to surround yourself with giant strangler fig trees (also known, less dramatically, as the Banyan Fig). This scary looking species, more prevalent in northern Queensland, looks like something you might expect to find in a haunted forest or a horror movie. The trees usually start life as the result of a seed dropped by a bird which lodges itself in a small hole in the bark of another tree. The strangler then uses this tree as a host, growing its roots downward toward the soil below and winding them around the host until it has literally sucked all the nutrients out of it.

Strangler figs are usually found in dark woodland like that of the rainforests in northern Queensland, where there is limited space for new trees to grow and sunlight is at a premium under the dense canopy - stranglers often end up as circles of branches around a hollow core, where the host tree has died and rotted away. They really are something spectacular to behold, and tourism companies will often take groups out to see the larger ones which look like something out of a fantasy world and just have to be seen to be believed.

At the centre of the gardens is a single wooden post sticking out of the ground, atop which is a metal date marker which reads 1974. This is a flood mark which was erected in 1999 to commemorate the many floods which have devastated the region over the last two centuries, and in particular indicates the high point of the great flood of 1974 when the water rose to a height of four and a half meters, destroying many of the most prized areas of the gardens and closing them for over two months.

Many of the palm trees around the gardens still lean quite noticeably from the force of the flood waters, and various attempts to right them using pulleys have failed. I say just leave them alone - let nature design its own look! Close by, a grove contains a collection of around twenty five species of bamboo and this commemorates the loss of one of the gardens best loved early attractions, Fern Island, a small island in a lagoon at the centre of the park which was reached by way of wooden foot bridges. The lagoon was reluctantly drained and filled, and Fern Island removed in 1937 as a result of increasing complaints from locals about the swarms of mosquitoes it drew in. It would seem as though the City Botanical Gardens are keen to remind us that nothing lasts forever. One of the last remaining features from the original gardens, in fact, is its famous Tamarind Tree. Planted in the mid-nineteenth century to provide food for early settlers, it still produces fruit to this day.

One of the most attractive things about the City Botanical Gardens is the fact that they are located right on the river front, and this, in itself, would be something which would be likely to draw me to the Brisbane area were I ever to be looking to relocate to an Australian city. By making your way through the park and past the restaurant, you find the trees starting to close in and begin to enter an area which feels altogether more natural and less and less as though you're in the middle of a big city. A little further on, you come out onto the quite amazing mangrove boardwalk. Built along the river front but also under a dense canopy of trees so that you feel mostly hidden from the city and more as though you're on a river in the forest than in a place like Brisbane, the mangrove walk really is something quite unlike anything I've seen before in any garden or park of any kind. Suddenly, the sounds of people disappear behind you, the densely packed trees acting as a natural barrier to much of the noise from the surrounding area. The only sound, apart from the occasional footsteps of your fellow visitors, is that of insects and birds in the trees or wading in the mud between the mangroves. What makes the mangrove boardwalk in Brisbane so special is that no attempt seems to have been made to make it at all touristy. Along a large section of the river bank, mud filled mangrove swamps are surrounded by dense woodland and vegetation, and wooden boardwalks zig-zag across its surface, held in place only by the suction of the mud beneath. It's as though somebody has lifted a section of mangrove swamp from beside a river in a tropical forest somewhere and dropped it in Brisbane, sticking the odd wooden pathway across it so people can pass through without sinking up to their shoulders in mud!

Australians are well known for their love of ecology and maintaining a natural environment, so much so that it sometimes feels as though taking a photograph of an animal out in the bush might result in a policeman suddenly appearing from out of nowhere and carting you off to jail for disturbing it (This is true of Aborigines, by the way. If you take a photo of an Aborigine without asking first, and he doesn't like it, expect to spend some time behind bars. Pretty much the same thing applies if you take a rock home or disturb the environment of Australia in any way - such is the Australian's all-encompassing wish to leave everything and everyone undisturbed.) This attitude to the environment definitely shows itself here, where virtually no unnecessary tinkering is done with the mangrove swamps other than to maintain the boardwalk from time to time. Stopping along the route and peering over the railings at the mud below reveals a plethora of swamp life, from minute crabs scuttling over the surface to wading birds who really look as though they shouldn't be able to stand on the mud without sinking. This is the nearest many of us will get to exploring a full-sized mangrove swamp without flying somewhere that requires a lot of injections - and on the way home, you can walk back along the river bank at the edge of the gardens and see some of the last remaining Australian Blue Gum trees in the area. Always assuming, of course, that you can avoid being run over by the cyclists who like to use the river path as a raceway.

Our stop in Brisbane had only been brief, but enjoyable. Our next port of call was much further north, in Cairns. On my previous trip, I had been fortunate enough to go SCUBA diving on the Great Barrier Reef amongst other things, and was looking forward to introducing Eloise to some of the same experiences. Our ultimate destination on the east coast was the rainforests of northern Queensland, where I had already booked a hotel in the heart of the forest, but first we had to use our new super-value phone card to call ahead and book somewhere to stay on arrival in Cairns as the courtesy bus to take us to our rainforest retreat wasn't due to pick us up for a couple of days. Suitcases in hand, we headed back to the Brisbane Transit Centre where we booked ourselves in and spent our last hour in the city wandering around the shops on the lower level and looking through our guide books for things to do in Cairns. This was going to be our longest coach trip yet.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.