Tuesday, January 2, 2018

Monday 1st to Tuesday 2nd January 2018 - Recovery day and the trip to Brisbane



Monday - Despite our late night, I awoke too early in my opinion, by 930am.  The plan was to be as lazy as possible today, so we started in good form, watching the film Dunkirk in bed whilst also getting all of our washing done.

We finally left the flat at 2pm for our New Year’s treat – seeing Star Wars.  We are making it our NY ‘thing’ having done exactly the same, watching Star Wars: Rogue One, at the Cinema last year in Tampa. We went to a Hoyt cinema and, despite having leather reclining seats and loads of space, it worked out cheaper than going to the cinema in the UK, at only £12 each.  Why does it cost so much to go and see a film in the UK?!  The film felt a little long for me, though Simon really enjoyed it.  Much like the last one, I was left feeling like I was watching the characters get into sort of the same circumstances as before!  But it had some cute animal-alien hybrid creatures in it and a casino full of weird aliens, much like the bar scene in the first (or fourth more accurately) Star Wars film. Anyway, no spoilers, in case you haven’t seen it.

After it ended, we headed straight back to the flat as we needed to pack and get an early night… and eat all of the left-over Christmas cheese and biscuits before our departure tomorrow.


Tuesday - Does it really count as a night’s sleep when the alarm goes at 330am?! We had no problem ordering an Uber to get us to the domestic airport for our 6am flight. Arriving in Queensland for the first time - they don’t use daylight saving, so the clocks went back by an hour, meaning that we landed before 630am!

We had a chance to feel like real actual backpackers as we staggered with our bags onto the train into the City.  We were still too early to get the shuttle bus to our accommodation, so instead we had an amazing breakfast by Brisbane South station (for me that means eggs benedict with salmon and avocado).  

Here, I’ll briefly explain some history.  In my gap year backpacking days, me and a group of friends chose not to stay in Sydney where most people seemed to stop.  We wanted to get travelling.  So we bought tickets for the ‘Oz Experience’ from Sydney all the way up to Cairns.  That meant travelling in buses of questionable quality (they regularly broke down) but stopping at some really unique locations off the beaten track.  That was when I had a go at sheep shearing and found my love of Port after visiting a distillery, to name a couple of the experiences.  So, instead of Sydney, we were pretty skint and needed jobs by the time we reached Brisbane (not that far up the coast then).  My mate Charlene (British, not Aussie) stayed at a Backpackers called ‘Somewhere to Stay’ (STS) for over a month in Brisbane and I remember it fondly.  In an attempt to re-visit this experience, I thought it would be fun for us to stay there too and try to re-live my youth, though this time in a double room with en-suite rather than a four-bed dorm as I had done in 1996! So, following our breakfast, I gave them a call to pick us up on the minibus.

I knew things would have changed, for example this seems to be a hostel appealing to German backpackers, there were hardly any Brits there, but they all spoke English to each other in any case.  Some parts of the hostel are exactly as I remember, whilst others are different than in my memories and the whole place was a bit run down to be honest! Maybe this was a handy reminder of the backpacker lifestyle but also why we are doing things a little differently (at our age!). The biggest surprise for me was their attitude to partying.  Back in ’96 there were events most nights of the week and these usually involved drinking competitions and cheap beers.  I was prepared for a heavy couple of nights, but apparently they ‘don’t encourage that sort of thing anymore’.  WHAT!?!? I’m here to re-live my drunken days…. What happened to change that?!  I was dismayed…..
 
On our arrival our room was not ready, so we sat outside and used some free Wi-Fi vouchers we had been given.  Eventually, we got into our room, a little jaded from our half-night’s sleep.  The room was also a little run down, but it did have a fridge, air conditioning and a telly... and no other smelly backpackers!  I did more blogging whilst Simon caught some zeds.




We had no intentions to do much today but eventually we had to venture out to get some food.  Unfortunately, we left this until 7pm when the deluge of tropical rain began! We caught the minibus to the local shops to get some soft drinks and items to put in our fridge for breakfast.  Here’s another quandary about backpacking versus campervanning – we now had nothing in our possession in the way of utensils – cutlery, mugs, pots, pans, you name it.  If we wanted to self-cater it would mean investing in all of those things again. So, Dominos for $5 pizzas it was then!  $5!! That’s about £3 for a medium sized pizza.  You’d never get that in the UK for that price either!  We didn’t want our pizzas to get cold, so we chose to get drenched running back to our room so that we could have our feast there in front of the TV before collapsing.

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