Wednesday 3rd January – Reminiscing in Briso

I must’ve been tired – I got 10 hours sleep last night!  Following a discussion, we decided to extend our stay here until Saturday and bought three days more Wi-Fi each for $10 which meant that I could get lots more blogging done.  However, we really wanted to get out today and start exploring (Simon) and reminiscing (me!).

We caught the 1pm shuttle bus from the hostel to the Southbank (more on this later), crossed over the bridge to Queen Street Mall and walked to the VC where we got a couple of ideas on things to do and purchased ‘Go’ cards for public transport.  The important difference here being that you pay $10 deposit for the cards, but at the end of our stay we will get refunded for any credit left along with the deposit – great. That’s how you do it Melbourne and Sydney – listen up!

Then the reminiscing tour began.  We walked to the end of Queen Street looking for a bar I used to work in.  I was convinced that it had been knocked down and replaced with a shiny high rise but, just as we were about to give up… there it was…. The Hotel Orient.  No longer a heavy metal live music bar as it was in 1996, it is now ‘Johnny Ringo’s Country Rock Saloon’ – complete with Bucking Bronco!  Wow.  It still looked at seedy as I remember.   

Looks a little out of place in this context...

I had worked in the ‘normal’ music bar and only had to venture into the topless bar next door when I needed to get some change from one of the strippers…. Ah, memories! Sadly, the bar was not open yet, but I had a peek through the windows and we took some external shots to show how out of place the building looks in its modern surroundings. I was glad that it had survived… but for how much longer?

 

Then we walked down to Eagle Quay where we jumped on the City Hopper – a free ferry taking in the main section of Brisbane’s waterways.  We only went a short distance over to Kangaroo Point.  It was time to revisit another old drinking haunt – the Story Bridge Hotel.  Again, expecting that it probably wouldn’t exist twenty years later, instead I was shocked by how up-market it now is. Luckily, they look after their heritage buildings that have been around since 1886!  The entire building has been refurbished into four or five bars of differing levels of plushness.

The Story Bridge itself, after which the pub is named

Beautiful architecture on the main building of the Story Bridge Hotel

 

The beer garden under the bridge we selected for lunch

I recall taking part in drinking competitions and stumbling out into the beer garden with the bridge ironwork towering above me. Look at it now!  I had promised Simon a beer and some lunch if he put up with me dragging him around to my old hang-outs.  

We walked down to the river and got back onto the City Hopper to take in more of the City views:

The trusty City Hopper cruising past Kangaroo point

Brisbane's South Bank 'fake' beach

This time we got off at the South Bank parklands – again, somewhere that I was looking forward to re-visiting.  Brisbane is set on a river, a fair distance from the coast to the east.  To solve the issue of not being by the sea, they have created a ‘fake beach’ on the south bank for people to bathe in, but again it has been much improved and extended since I last saw it. I have many happy memories of sunbathing here with friends and a hilarious memory of a jaunt down here after a drinking session when a group of us were asked to leave by security for skinny dipping (NOT me…).

From there I had seen one more pub that I wanted to revisit, the Fox Hotel.  Today was basically turning into a pub crawl (and what, dear reader, is wrong with that?!). And, as before, I was amazed at how up-market the pub had become.  Brisbane has been very busy renovating and upgrading.  I remembered one of my favourite features of the pub being an inside courtyard with windows a few tiers above you with plants dangling down from the windowsills.  I was glad to see that this feature remains (right). 

A speedy drink enabled us to catch the 615pm STS minibus back from the Southbank, stopping off for some snacks and drinks on route. What an excellent day we’d had in Brisbane.  I got to remember why I love this place.