Doug

Doug having a quiet beer in the Elephant and Wheelbarrow.

Doug and stuff

Early in the morning of Wednesday the 29th of August I was woken by a call from Douglas. He was just letting me know that he was on his way to Brisbane and would be arriving within the hour.

About an hour later I met him at Central Station, the first face from home I'd seen since Swag and Mac left Melbourne at the end of February.

We spent the day cutting about Melbourne and sorting out a few travel issues Douglas had then went to the cinema at night to see Snakes On A Plane. That film is pure genius!

The next night we drank a few cups of goon in the hostel while playing drinking games before heading out. We stopped of in a bar in Fortitude Valley which had a live band playing before spending the rest of the night in the Down Under Bar, a popular backpacker haunt. Somehow, and disappointingly, I didn't manage to get drunk that night although Douglas seemed pretty well oiled and was enjoying dancing about.

The next night was Thursday night and that meant one thing: $2 drinks at Fridays. Douglas was stressing about getting up early the next morning for his bus up to Airlie Beach so he let the side down by staying in that night but I headed out with a big group from the hostel.

It was a great night because there was a big group of around 20 of us. The $2 drinks didn't disappoint and I must've had about 20 of them but about 10 minutes before we all left, at around 2am, I still felt reasonably sober. That changed very quickly though as the taxi ride back to the hostel was a bit of a blur as was the random mayhem when we all arrived back. Some people mentioned something to do with me dancing around in my boxer shorts but it doesn't ring any bells with me.

R.I.P Steve Irwin

I just heard minutes ago that Steve Irwin has been killed near Cairns. Apparently he was killed by a stingray barb that went through his chest while filming an underwater documentary.

Early reports can be found at:
news.com.au
yahoo.com.au

I've just done some quick reading on stingrays and, according to www.greatbarrierreefaustralia.com, stingray related human fatalities are few and far between.

I think the fact that after all his time irritating massive crocodiles, and mucking about with some of the most venomous animals ever to inhabit the planet, he was killed by such a relatively harmless creature only adds to the sadness. It's more than a little ironic.

I'm tempted to head to Australia Zoo tomorrow to pay my respects, although it may well be closed.

R.I.P. Steve Irwin
Crocodile Hunter
Legend

Good afternoon Mr Smith. This is Colin from Optus in Brisbane.

I'm sure many of you are wondering how I'm getting on and if I have a job yet. I actually got a job a couple of weeks ago. It was for a company called Avoncore who operate a call centre on behalf of Optus, one of the biggest telecommunications companies in Australia. I did my two days training and then found out that I wasn't getting paid for it altough I was 75% certain I had been told at my interview that I was getting paid for it. I was also told at the end of my training that any phone or internet packages I sold would earn me $10 commission on top of my base rate altough I had been told at my interview that I would receive $10/$15 commission for selling internet/phone or phone/internet packages, I can't remember which way round it was. I felt like i had been lied to a fair bit in a few days but I started working on the phones the next day anyway. I needed the money.

At my interview I had been told that I would be answering inbound calls which were generated from a cold calling centre in India but I spent my first day sat at a computer cold calling lists of people until about 8:10pm. Clearly this wasn't what I'd signed up for. Maybe if I had sold a few things I would've given it another day but I was pretty pissed off with the whole state of affairs and chucked in the job the very next morning.

Here's one of the crocs

A koala and its baby

There are quite a lot of animals in different parts of Dreamworld including koalas, tigers and crocodiles. I really like this picture.

This year's BB contestants

The winner's the guy on the left.

Dreamworld

A few weeks ago I went to Dreamworld, a theme park on the Gold Coast. It was a lovely sunny Saturday so I took a train, then a bus, then a train, then a bus to get there althought the return ticket I bought cost less than 4 quid. If only the trains and buses in Scotland were as cheap.

I arrived there at about 9:40am and set about trying to go on as many rides as possible before the park got busy and the queues got too long.

As theme parks go Dreamworld is prety decent and reminded me a great deal of Alton Towers although it doesn't have any particularly spectacular rollercoasters. It certainly has nothing as good as Nemesis.

The best rides there were The Claw, The Giant Drop and the Tower of Terror. For explanations of what the rides do you can go to the Dreamworld website. In saying that, The Big Drop is exactly what it sounds like. It's pretty much the same as Ice Blast (formerly Playstation) at Blackpool Pleasure Beach but instead of getting shot into the air before dropping, you get raised slowly and spend about 20 seconds at the top, anticipating the moment when the ride starts to plummet and your stomach ends up in your skull. It was the only really good ride I never made it onto twice because the queue was over an hour long.

The other thing I got to do at Dreamworld was take a wander around the Australian Big Brother house since their version is filmed in a back corner of the park. I'd seen a bit of the recent Big Brother series which only finished 6 days before I went to the park so it was quite cool wandering through the garden, around the bedroom, kitchen and into the diary room. It was quite a strange experience as rooms didn't seem to be where I thought they had been when I was watching the series. Also, Jamie, the winner of this year's BB, was in the house signing autographs when I was their. If there was no queue I might've wandered up to the guy for a photo but the queue was an hour long. An hour of rides was clearly the more sensible option.

A few Fridays ago

A few Fridays ago a group of us were playing a drinking version of Scabby Queen before heading out for a few drinks. Somehow I managed to get spectacularly drunk and only spent $4. Bargain!

(Pic. from left to right: Sean, Amanda, Angie, Michel, Kat, Sam)

Brisbane River

Brisbane. Worth seeing?

I went out again the next night with a group of girls from the hostel and one of Aude's friends, a Canadian girl called Chantelle. I started off the night by scooping a bottle of rose wine before we headed out to a bar called GPO where Paul, a friend of Chantelle's, was DJing. We drank there until he finished his set before heading out with Paul and his friends to a few other bars. That night was a good laugh because there were quite a few of us.

Since then I've been searching for work, doing a little of jogging (it's nice by the river at night) and just generally trying to get a feel for this place. I've also moved to a slighlty cheaper hostel just around the corner from Bunk called the Prince Consort.

Out of all the cities in Australia Brisbane seems to have polarzied the opinions of the people that I've met that have been here more than any other city. I'm not convinced of the grammar in that last sentence but what I mean was that about half the people I've met love the place and the other half thought it was a bit of a nothing city.

I'm undecided. The weather's certainly warmer and drier up here than it was down in Adelaide. I don't think the daily maximum temperature has dropped below 20C since I arrived. The river's nice, there are plenty of shops and cinemas and other places to go but I don't think there's anything here that is definitely worth seeing.

Hopefully I'll find a job soon and in time find the reason others love this place.

Inside Family

Looking for a bed

My flight from Sydney to Brisbane landed at around 19:35. After collecting my bags I decided it was time to find out how to get to the city centre. I got chatting to a local girl who told me that I'd just missed the last train so my best bet was a shuttle bus into the city. We walked up to the desk to book our tickets and when the lady at the counter asked me where I wanted dropped off I calmly responded that anywhere in the city centre would be fine as I hadn't booked a hostel yet.

She looked a little shocked.

Apparently she was under the impression that, although there are a great many hostels in Brisbane, there weren't many available beds. She suggested that I go to the tourist information desk in the airport and try and book a hostel immediately then book my bus once I had that sorted.

I took her advice, headed to the tourist info desk and asked the lady there if she could book me into a hostel. She said that the desk didn't book hostels, only hotels but showed me where I could find leaflets for hostels so I could phone them myself. She then offered a slightly sarcastic, "Good luck," the kind that told me that I might struggle to find a bed, but didn't really help matters.

I managed to collect leaflets for about ten different hostels and started systematically phoning them, asking if they had any free beds. After about half of them had knocked me back I started to become a little concerned.

At that point I decided to book my bus ticket and phone the remaining hostels from my mobile while waiting on the bus. Eventually I managed to find a bed at a place called Bunk, a fairly modern hostel in an are a called Fortitude Valley. Apparently 'The Valley' is nicknamed "The Las Vegas of Brisbane" although it's nothing close. There are more pubs, bars and clubs there than anywhere else in the city centre though.

Bunk website

After getting getting of the bus at the Roma Street Transit Centre in the CBD I had about a twenty five minute walk with all my bags to reach the hostel so by the time I got there I was more than hhappy to just K.O. on my bed.

I spent Thursday 6th July walking around the city, trying to get a feel for the place. Immediately I noticed two things: that the weather was nicer than Adelaide and that there were a lot of tall residential buildings in the city. In most of the other cities in Australia the majority of the skyscrapers have been office buildings but in Brisbane the majority of the tall buildings are hotels or apartments.

I went out on the Friday night with Aude, a french girl from my room, and Frank, a Scottish/English guy from my room. We had a few drinks in Birdee Num Nums, the bar connected to the hostel, then headed out into the Valley to a few other bars before finishing the night in a club called Family. It was a pretty cool place with great lighting and some really cool bars, including a literally cool bar that was covered in ice. It was just a pity the music was crap, or at least not to my taste. Too much repetitive bass, no singing.

Check out the Family website.

Ayers Rock from the air

The best part of the flight from Ayers Rock to Sydney was the view of the rock from the air.

Leaving Yulara

Later that evening Alan and I went to dinner at the Outback Pioneer, the kind of budget accommodation of the resort. Dinner there involved buying a cut of the raw meat of your choice at the counter and cooking it yourself on one of the many grills available. I had a big lamb steak as it had been a while since I'd eaten lamb. There was a salad bar there too to accompany your meat with salad, baked potatos and the like.

Entertainment was provided by the old guy on the stage at the front who was played a set of acoustic covers before becoming a DJ. He stuck mostly to classic shady DJ fare like Wham and Abba but the young crowd which filled the small dance floor lapped it up. At one point I got harassed into joining a conga which thankfully fininshed within seconds of me grudgingly getting to my feet.

The next morning I rose a little later than I had intended, jumped into Chops2 and bolted off to try not to miss the sunrise for the second day in a row. Luckily I didn't miss seeing it, although I had to make do with watching it from the car as, again, I made it to the viewing area a little late.

After taking a couple more pictures I headed off to the Mala car park at the base of the rock, this time so that I could do the 9.4km walk around the base of Ayers Rock.

The walk takes you past many interesting features as well as past quite a few sites which are of spiritual importance to the Mala people. There are signs at such sites which tell you not to photograph these areas but, unlike with climbing the rock, fines apply if you are caught ignoring these signs. Often there was very little to see at these sites and so it wasn't really a problem to not take photos.

The walk took almost two hours in total and by the time I was finished the initially cold morning had warmed considerably. I was really getting used to the sunshine again.

After leaving the rock I headed back to Alan's place to pick up my bags and Alan gave me a lift to Connellan Airport in time for my 13:35 flight to Brisbane via Sydney.

See the difference?