Today the hot shower was the most important thing to us. It had been over 4 day since the cold shower at Bondi and over a week since our last hot shower at James. We headed straight for Brisbane town centre to find an internet cafe. The parking signs in Australia are like a riddle at best often saying things like ‘1p ticket Tues, 2p 3pm-4pm etc’ then other small print you can’t even read. We decided to just abandon our van near the shopping centre pedestrian street, well it did say we could get a ticket – and we did. We found a net cafe but were horrified to find that the expensive and most horrid place to stay in Noosa was actually the cheapest place we found. In the end we discovered a $60 hotel and set off, after a bit of lunch, to try and find it. We didn’t have a map of Brisbane town centre and our one of Australia just showed the whole of Brisbane as a blob. After driving for some time and feeling like we were lost I spotted a sign saying ‘Economotel’ only $59 double room. We decided that was the place for us.
The guy on the desk was probably a murderer and his opening line was ‘we don’t allow kiwis’ but we assured him we were actually English in spite of the tribal Kiwi necklace I had bought Vincent for a dollar in Bondi making him sure we were Kiwi. The room was a dump, the bed was barely screwed together and the bathroom was shared with a whole block – but there was hot water and lots of it! We spent most of the after noon in the shower generally feeling much better after the hot water. We went for a couple of strolls into Brisbane that afternoon and evening but really wanted to make the most of our hotel so watched some TV and wrote up the blog while we had electricity – oh and we watched the end of Priscilla Queen of the desert that we had started watching in the Venman National Park, it’s about a crazy road trip in Australia for those of you who haven’t seen it.
We had OK nights sleep, although I have to admit the van is comfier and doesn’t squeak so much when you turn over! But hey when we got up there was a toaster and another hot shower to look forward to! Most of the veggies dried out after the cool box disaster but now the box isn’t cool and we lost the lettuce to mould.