Day 54 (Mountain Creek to Brisbane, 115 km):

Saturday, December 21, we left Kieran and Tammy’s place around 10:30 to head to Brisbane. We were too early to check into our hotel, so we took in the view of the city from the Mount Coot-tha viewpoint to the southwest of downtown Brisbane. The viewpoint provides expansive views of the city, the Brisbane River, and even some of the coastline far off in the distance.

We had a bite to eat and would remark to ourselves once again how darned expensive it is to eat out in Australia. A couple of salads and some drinks and we were looking at an $88 AUD bill which is still nearly $60 USD. Ack! I’m choking. I’ve fallen and I can’t get up. Dear mom, I broke my wallet.

After dying on the cafeteria over the price, and then being resurrected (metaphor, I didn’t die), we went to the Brisbane Botanic Gardens at Mount Coot-tha. The gardens are amazingly lovely. So densely vegetated and so well cared for. I won’t attempt to review all the different plants. I will note that in addition to the beautiful plants, they had some excellent lizard’s living there, and an eel in the lake. We saw the eel but didn’t have the camera ready for the pictures.

We also bought tickets for a 50th Anniversary Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon music and stars event at the planetarium. Those tickets were for Monday!!!!!

We headed down the hill to our hotel, parked the car and started out on foot. We went down to the waterfront to get some dinner and to take night pictures of the Kangaroo Point Bridge for pedestrians, and the Story Bridge with all its many different lights. We ate at a restaurant that charged $5.50 for a glass of soda that is about two gulps. Good lord food/drink is crazy priced here.

Once again after choking on the price, we headed out for some pictures. We were going to try out one of the many ferries they have running on the Brisbane River. But it was going to take longer than walking to our picture spot for Story Bridge. We decided to walk and take the ferry another day. The Story Bridge is lit up in rotating colors of purple, green, blue, red, white and green in different combinations. Sometimes the colors flash and move. Other times they are static. The backdrop for the bridge pictures is the downtown section of the city with all its towers. Truly a beautiful way to end the evening.

Day 55:

We didn’t want to battle traffic and struggle for parking on a museum day, so we left the car in the hotel garage. We took and Uber to the Queensland Museum. This is a natural museum focused on Australia and Queensland life. The museum includes Dinosaurs, gems and a variety of animal taxidermy.

They had a small section of the museum dedicated to Australian participation in WWI and to a lesser degree in WWII. One of their signature exhibits is a 1918 German tank called Mephisto. The tank got stuck in an artillery shell hole and was abandoned by the Germans.

And, of course, no good natural museum would be complete without dinosaurs. Oh, and all the other contemporary animals. And the dinosaurs. And some sea life taxidermy. And the dinosaurs. Blah, blah, blah and the dinosaurs. Are you detecting a theme?

Before we left the museum, we had a snack. We tried a cauliflower pot pie and a brownie. The pie was really good. The brownie had an odd, grainy texture. While it was chocolate and that offsets a great deal of texture issues, I wouldn’t call the brownie good. It was okay. And it was satisfying for a late morning snack.

The next stop was the Gallery of Modern Art. The focus of the gallery’s current exhibit was Australia / Islandia and Asia. Modern art is not typically my favorite type, though I generally find some works that I find compelling. This was no different. I hadn’t heard of any of the artists. I particularly liked works by Darrell Sibosado, Zhang Xu Zhan and Brett Graham.

The last museum of the day was the Queensland Art Gallery. This was your typical art gallery with a mix of classic and contemporary pieces including sculptures, paintings and water dragons.

“Water dragons? What are water dragons?” you ask. I’ll tell you. They are the little critters that accompany you when you sit out on the patio eating quiche and cookies at the Queensland Art Gallery. More specifically they are a type of lizard. Even more specifically, the big ones are a good half a meter (18 inches) and look like something sort of prehistoric. I hate to say that they were the best part of the gallery for us, but they were.

Not that we don’t love Pissarro, Degas, Rubens and all our other favorites. The gallery had a nice, if a bit small collection of artists from around the world. And we got to eat lunch with dragons. Dragons, I tell you. No fire. No smoke. No wings. But they were dragons just the same.

The South Bank of the Brisbane River downtown is an arts and tourist destination. What would any good tourist destination be without a giant Ferris wheel? They are a bit gimmicky and still good fun. We rode. We took pictures. We stayed cool. Thankfully the cars had AC. The weather wasn’t as extremely hot as it was further up north. It was in the mid-80s (30s in C) though it wasn’t as humid and there was a good breeze.

I’m still trying to imagine the little plexiglass terrariums you ride in on the wheel baking in the sun without AC. I’m picturing myself like a hamster in a microwave, as Robin Williams once joked about, “Beep! Pop goes the weasel.” The view was nice. The AC was nice, too.

We took a ferry from the South Bank to the north bank to visit the City Botanic Gardens. For a 24x7 open park, they have done a great job with the gardens. There is a great variety of tropical and heat-tolerant flora in the gardens. The first banyan fig we saw was unbelievable. Overall, the gardens up the hill at Mount Coot-tha were more polished and far more extensive.  

We finished the day off with a visit to St. John’s Cathedral, an Anglican church built around 1901. It is a magnificent neo-gothic structure complete with flying buttresses and stained-glass windows. It is also deeply stained with the taint of extensive sexual misconduct by at least one priest.

I can appreciate the beauty of the architecture and the spiritual ideal behind the cathedral while being open about my strongly negative feelings toward the terribly abusive harm that some people within Christendom have done over the past two millennia. And the further harm done by leaders within Christendom to hide the abuse and the abusers so that the behavior continued unchecked. I have super mixed feelings about posting photos of the place. As I noted, my chief interest is in the architecture, and the spiritual ideal.

Day 56:

December 23, Christmas Eve Eve. We had tickets for Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon at the Planetarium for 3 PM. I like to be early to make sure I get good seats when it is general admission. So, we didn’t plan a lot for Day 56. We started the day by going to Fortitude Valley to see the remnants of Chinatown. As with other cities we have visited, the concept of a specific neighborhood dedicated to the Asian, specifically to the Chinese community, has almost faded away completely.

I have mixed feelings about that. I like/hope that Asian community members have found their way to meld into society at large. I dislike the loss of a very interesting and iconic subculture within so many “western” cities. While not as run down as Portland’s Chinatown section and maybe 1% as many homeless, the town in Brisbane is still in an obvious decline. The neighborhood is rough with ‘adult entertainment’ establishments every few buildings.

I remember visiting Chinatown in San Francisco several times when I was a kid. I loved how unique and distinctive were the buildings, the store wares, the aromas, the sounds of music and the sounds of people speaking predominately Chinese. It went on for maybe twenty or thirty square blocks. No more. Ten years ago, it was maybe six or eight and those seem to be on the edge of closing in favor of skyrise apartments.

We kept our visit to Fortitude Valley to just about an hour, the time on our digital meter for parking the car on the street. Then we made our way up to the Brisbane Botanic Gardens at Mount Coot-tha once again.

We spent about 30 minutes at the lagoon hoping to catch a view of the eels they have there. No luck. It was a lovely walk in the low 80-something weather. We got back in the car and drove further up to a section that we didn’t get to see on Saturday, the Australian Plants Trail.

This section of the park circles around another lake. It winds around in the woods and down into a set of gardens to the south of the lake. It was a pleasant walk. We got to see a black and white Australian magpie up close. It likely was accustomed to people feeding it. It landed on the table next to some folks who had just finished a picnic. It stood there as we all chatted and moved around it. It is a pretty if pesky bird. They can be quite aggressive.

As we were driving further up to turn around and head back down, we got to see a sulphur-crested cockatoo. They are all white except for a yellow crest on their head, and their black beak and claws. It is so strange to see birds in the wild that in all my time in the USA I have only ever seen in a pet store or a zoo.

But cockatoos must give way to Pink Floyd.

At 3 PM, we were the first people into the planetarium theater to see and hear Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon show. The planetarium is a circular room with a domed ceiling. The show was projected onto the ceiling. The chairs reclined to allow the viewers to comfortably see the whole ceiling.

I have loved the Dark Side of the Moon since I was a kid. It is my all-time favorite music album. I love every song on the album. I will admit that while I love “Money”, I don’t think it works well with the rest of the album. However, they did a fine job with the video of incorporating it into the space theme and helping to tie it into the show.

The show was fantastic. I loved watching Laser Floyd at the Laserium in Seattle years ago. 40 years later and you can still watch Laser Pink Floyd’s the Wall every Saturday night in Seattle!!!! I think that I forgot how much I loved that show. It was even better updated as a space show. I could watch it again a thousand times, just like I could listen to the album a thousand more times, I’m sure.

When the show was over, we spent another hour walking around the rainforest sections of the gardens before heading back to the hotel. I continued to hear Dark Side of the Moon in my mind’s ear for hours after the show. What a great way to enjoy the gardens, with Brain Damage and Eclipse earworms. It was so very good.

We dropped the car off at the hotel and grabbed an Uber to head back to Chinatown. There was a 4.7 rated pho place there that I wanted to try. Earlier in the day, I noticed several shops having 4 PM for their opening time. I thought, perhaps, that Chinatown had a night market concept since the day market was so empty.

Loud buzzer sound…aaaaaa! Nope. Not even close. The 4.7 pho place was closed for two weeks leading up to new year. The rest of the area was hit-and-miss closed. We found another place serving pho since I now had a craving. It was good. Not superb, but good. Then we headed back to the hotel to get ready to head further down the coast.

- See you in Ballina -