We left Byron with all of our group, but left most of them in quite possibly the most disgusting place I've seen in Australia: Surfer's Paradise. As soon as we neared it I was SO glad Soozie and I had decided to head straight for Brisbane. I don't understand how people can possibly like the place, it's just a beach with a load of huge buildings behind it. If you're going to sit on the beach surely you want something nicer going on around you!?

So we arrived in Brisbane at 6pm-ish and the bar in our hostel was already absolutely heaving. We couldn't really be bothered with drinking though, so spent the evening cooking and chatting to a nice Canadian guy who was in our room (and had a lot of odd tattoos).

Our first day in Brisbane started just the way I like, with coffee and a muffin :-) We were on a mission to change our flights so spent much of the morning looking for and talking to STA, only to find that they couldn't help us! We were told to email London, who also couldn't help us. So we filled in a query form online, which also couldn't help us. We ended up sorting the issue over several phone calls with a lovely chap in the Covent Garden office, who helped us even though he wasn't supposed to, and are now flying out of Oz on 6th Nov. Woop!

Brisbane is a lovely city, I'd decided within about 30 minutes that I could live there. We wandered around the shopping street and made our way to City Hall, which houses Brisbane Museum. To be honest, as a museum it kind of sucks, but they did have a small fashion exhibit which interested us and included an outfit SJP wore in an episode of Sex... The building has a clock tower that you can take a lift up for views of the city. Pretty cool, but you can't see much; the high rise buildings get in the way. We did have a great view of this cute little church though, which we went as soon as we were back on street level. It was red and white and named St. Albert's. Such a lovely church with a really friendly guy outside who welcomed us in. They had this beautiful organ, which they were tuning at the time. Would have been nicer to hear it being played properly!

We spent the afternoon wandering around the city and the south bank area (which is lovely - you could so easily bring up kids here), and checked out an exhibit on aboriginal and torres strait islanders in the Queensland Museum, which was really interesting and believe it or not pretty much the first thing we've come across embracing the culture. It's such a shock after New Zealand. I don't like it.

In the evening we met up with Tess and Nigel, who we met in New Zealand. They took us on the City Cat ferry and over to the Botanic Gardens before dinner at a place called JoJo's! I forgot to take a photo though :-( Had a great evening with them, it's always nice to see a city through a local's eyes and was great to catch up and laugh about the Kiwi trip.

Our second and final day in Brisbane was spent at the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary. Sooooo awesome! We'd seen a few koalas in the wild already, but to see so many in one place was so cool. They are the cutest things ever. Also saw kangaroos, emus, wombats, yucky bats, a load of pretty parrots etc etc. By far the best bit was cuddling a koala! I wanted to take mine home. She was called Theresa and the cutest. Kind of felt like holding a baby, except they grip on to your shoulders with their claws (it doesn't hurt). We have professional photos but were allowed to take some of our own too, so there's lots of evidence!

So that's it for Brisbane, I haven't done it justice, but I loved it. We hear a lot of comments about various places in Australia, and people were quite often negative about Brisbane or had heard a bad story and so were going to skip it. I really don't know why, it's an awesome city.