This morning we had a lie in at the hotel and watched another movie from the laptop called Slumdog Millionaire all about a boy from the slums in Mumbai who won the Indian version of who wants to be a millionaire. It was a very good movie and showed a lot of places we had visited, apparently it is probably going to win an Oscar and has already won an award for the catchy theme song jai-ho. After another shower, we weren’t going to see a hot shower no until Melbourne so wanted to make the most of it, we set of for a walk to the lookout point we had found last night to take some photos. There was also an interesting flowering giant cactus growing there which we took pictures of too. Brisbane is quite a pretty city although not very big. The weather on the sunshine coast had not been good and Brisbane, although warm, wasn’t at beach temperature. We decided to head for the Gold coast again and got as far as Mermaid beaches by the afternoon.
We set up for lunch on one the public barbeque areas (hot plates found at the edges of play parks for Aussies to cook the kids lunch on!) and put our gas burner down on it to cook lunch, you weren’t meant to start fires but we decided that if the hotplate was ok for a barbeque it should be safe enough to have our primus on it. The egg fried rice and veggies was wearing rather thin after so long of eating it but we had become experts at timings and cooking with only one hob so it still tasted ok. As I went off to do the washing up we noticed one of the birds with very long curved black beaks edging towards our table, Vincent has named these the ‘Snooper’ birds because he claimed for ages that was the proper name for a long nose (whether on anything from a Clown Loach fish to a bird) although he was making it up. The bird was very funny as it edged towards our cooking things and tried to poke its hugely long curved beak into everything and have a sample. They were quite shy though so the photos I got aren’t very clear.
One of the other interesting points of the day was that I finally found out how to turn on our rear windscreen wipers! We had been in the van well over a week but that had eluded us from the start, along with how to fill up the reservoir for the front screen wash which was a small bottle at the front by the passenger’s feet with a pull off cap that left you about 3cms room above the opening so it was impossible to pour water into it.
We stopped in a residential area again for the night planning on plenty of beach time tomorrow.