March 3rd - Brisbane, Australia

Fred and I are standing in the middle of this picture.  With a name as long as Brisbane you have to stand way back to get all the letters in and the young lady who took this for us did the best she could.

We’ve been to Brisbane before and did a great tour then.  We visited the Koala Sanctuary and I got to hold a cute one for a while.  This time we decided to walk around in Brisbane on our own for a few hours.  It’s a very nice city, frequently listed as one of the most ‘livable’ in the world.  We certainly liked it.

Below is the view of the city from our ship.  As you can see, we weren’t exactly ‘in the neighborhood’.  A ship our size is docked way out with the grain warehouses.  This doesn’t make it easy to get in and out of the city.  Compounding that, we were also leaving relatively early at 4:30 PM…but of course you have to be on board before that.  The complementary shuttle to downtown took 45 minutes one way. The last shuttle back to the ship would leave at 3:30 PM and we didn’t even dock until 8AM.  Whew…

Luckily the city itself is pretty compact as you can see on the map below.  The big red dot in the middle was where the shuttle dropped us off.  Fred and I managed to cover most of the city in the time we had.

The red dotted line in the river is a free boat ferry for locals and tourists.  We took it from Eagle Street (off to the right-hand side of the map) to North Quay (middle).  It was a nice ride.  The boat was a distinctive red color and we got some nice views from the stern.

There is also a commuter pay ferry that goes up and down the river.  We were looking at that schedule when one of the employees asked us if he could help.  He explained about the free ferry (we didn’t know anything about it) and told us where to pick it up.  We walked over to the correct dock and he followed us over to make sure we got on the right boat going in the right direction.  Again, such great help from the locals when you visit Australia!

The city itself is very walkable, but you could take the free bus service around as well. In fact, every Australian city we’ve gone to has some sort of free transportation within the city center.   We got to see a lot of the different architecture and city streets while we were here. 

The city doesn’t have a lot of ‘must see’ attractions except for the Koala Sanctuary maybe and the ship ran an excursion to that ($78 pp).  We are close to Zoo Australia, the zoo that Steve Erwin ran, and there were excursions from the ship that went there ($114 pp).  You could take a tour of the city and a boat ride ($118pp) but we kind of did that for free.  A tour via Segway ran about $154 pp.  Of course, we’ve been here before so felt more comfortable going it on our own.

Tomorrow we are at sea and then we have two days in Sydney.  Before we left Brisbane, I got a picture of the luckiest birds in the world.  The grain piled here next to the dock stays covered most of the time but when they have to move it well… the birds come in for lunch…we saw some very fat pigeons around!