Brisbane: Friday 14th January - Sunday 16th January

We arrived in Brisbane not really knowing what to expect. After seeing so much coverage on the news of streets underwater and hearing so many stories about the flooding - the night before we left Surfers we shared a room with a couple who lived in Brisbane but had to flee when their neighbourhood went under, they had some incredible pictures - we wondered what we were in for and if we were crazy to go.

The city is one of peaks and valleys and as such our hostel, situated as it was on top of a hill, was unaffected by the floods. This was perhaps the only good point about the place though, and when the only positive factor about a hostel is that it isn't underwater you know it aint gonna be The Ritz! The Base Hostel is a huge old converted hotel with slam-door lifts and a lot of character but some pretty work-shy cleaners, the only reason that we stayed there was because of the fact that we had our free nights courtesy of our escapades in the Scary Canary in Sydney.

After checking in we wandered around the city, its a beautiful place with a charming mixture of old and new architecture and probably the cleanest city I've ever been in aside from Singapore, which is just freakishly clean. The South Bank is a highlight of the city, full of cool little riverside restaurants and bars and a man-made beach, unfortunately it was still half submerged under the swollen river but walking around the area was an odd experience - like walking around a ghost town All the bars were hidden behind sandbags and the roads that weren't flooded were ankle-deep in muddy sludge. It felt wrong, almost voyeuristic, wandering around the area like the tourists we were but we couldn't pass up the opportunity to witness history in the making.

On our second day in the city we took a walk up to Fortitude Valley, a very strange part of town full of sex shops and huge nightclubs that probably make a lot more sense when lit up at night, but in the daytime it just kinda looks like when the lights go up at 3am in a nightclub! Later that day we went to a cool little independent antique-looking cinema operated by Tribal Travel and and watched some arty film with Joaquin Phoenix and Casey Affleck. The film was pretty terrible but when you're paying $5 total for 2 tickets you can't complain.

We ended the day by heading over to the hostel where the Cornwall girls were staying and spent the evening drinking and playing pool with them. We both left Brisbane with a feeling that we probably missed out on a lot, not just the South Bank but also Australia Zoo which was pretty much unaccessible too, but that the place definitely had potential.