Brisbane

Brisbane is located in the state of Queensland, on the northeastern side of Australia. Queensland is known for its famous Gold Coast, about 41 miles southeast of Brisbane. Here you will no doubt glimpse the perfectly chiseled/tanned Thor doppelgangers, on their way to surf.

Brisbane is the 3rd most populated city of the country, after Sydney and Melbourne. The area was established as a secondary penal colony after Sydney. So while you're there, look to your left, then your right, and you'd probably have just met the modern day descendants of the monarch's former convicts.

While Brisbane was not on my bucketlist, I have a friend who lives here, and who came to keep me company on my vacation to the land down under. It naturally became a natural stopping point for me.

While in Brisbane, you should stop by Steve Irwin's zoo. The zoo is home to many animals which are native only to Australia.

While there, I fell in love with baby wombats, watched men risk their limbs to put on a croc show, pet sleeping koalas, hand-fed kangaroos/wallabies, and saw more than enough deadly snakes to last me a lifetime.

All in all, this was a classic must-do experience for a tourist. The price for entry to the zoo was a bit steep. General admission for an adult at the LA zoo is $21.00 USD ($27 AUD); whereas it was $46.00 USD ($59 AUD) at the Irwin zoo.

Another place I'd recommend is O'Reilly's Tree Top Walk in Lamington National Park, about a 2 hour scenic drive from Brisbane.

The tree top rainforest walk involves 9 suspension bridges with a bird's eye view for brave souls willing to make the climb up a steel ladder nearly 100 feet up.

There is also a botanical garden accessible from the same path to the tree top walk. Along that path you will see huge Booyong Trees, which are rainforest trees native to Australia with gnarly, shallow roots that look quite sinister. In the garden, I felt very enclosed, meaning the air was thick and you are surrounded by dense growth. Everywhere you look there are strangler figs, with roots growing on host trees and slowly strangling them to death. All of the roots looked like snakes or veins. It felt like I was placed in an alien landscape. It was absolutely magnificent.

In addition, a trip to Brisbane is not complete without a visit to the Gold Coast, about an hour south of downtown. Being from LA, I ad several beaches readily accessible, so I wanted to know what made this coastline special. When I arrived, I immediately noticed how white, clean, and soft the sand was! It almost seemed as though the sand had been distilled to remove any biological or man-made clutter. Absolutely gorgeous.

Here are some final take away thoughts I had about Brisbane (and Sydney as well, but that'll be a separate post)- I came to realize that Australians like to give nicknames to everything (think bikkie instead of biscuits), tend to say Ta and Cheers instead of Thanks and Good Day, and are overall genuinely nice people. What a pleasant surprise to meet TSA agents who did not treat you like you were wanted for murder! Finally, I failed to meet my goal of coming back with a decent Australian accent, no matter how much I tried to practice the tones and inflection while I was there. My friend and I both cringed every time I tried.

Also, the high cost of things, like food, gas, hotels, tickets to events, really started to add up! My friend repeatedly warned me about this prior to my arrival, but being someone who lives in Los Angeles, and prior to that San Francisco, I didn't quite believe him, naively thinking I somehow owned the bragging rights to costly living! For example, parking in downtown Brisbane cost $100 AUD (about $78 USD) if you park more than 3 hours. In comparison, most downtown LA businesses and hotels charge up to $45 USD to park for an entire evening, which I had already considered to be highway robbery.