Brisbane Botanical Gardens
We spent the day in the South Bank area of Brisbane. For the first time in a long while it didn’t rain at all. This morning we caught the bus, though the schedule we had from the park was wrong, and the busses were running at a different time, so we had to wait for the bus for about half an hour. When the bus did arrive it wasn’t too long to get to the South Bank area, perhaps 30 minutes.
This was the site of the 1988 World’s Fair. Now it is a park and walkway along the Brisbane River, with a number of museums and other cultural sites located at one end. We walked along the river for about a kilometre to the “Goodwill Bridge”, a footbridge across the river to the Botanical Gardens. Along the way we passed a fairly large swimming area, “Street Beach” and the maritime museum. The area of the gardens is where the original settlement of Brisbane was located, and where they learned how to grow crops in the tropical area such as sugar cane and pineapple. It is a nice park, though it doesn’t have as many kinds of flowering plants as the Sydney Botanical Gardens do.
David and Enid at Christmas Tree, Queensland Parliament
We stopped in front of the Queensland Parliament where a German family asked us to take their picture in front of the Christmas tree, and then they did the same for us. After that we ate our lunch in the park, and a man came by, quite agitated and asked us if we knew where the park caretakers were, as he’d seen a carpet snake. We told him where the information booth was. A few minutes later one of the park volunteers came by and told us that if we wanted to see a nice snake, we should go look at it. He was quite sarcastic about the man who had reported it, and told us that it was a python, they find them in the park all the time, and they aren’t really dangerous.
Next we stopped at Old Government House, the residence of the Governor’s General for the colony of Queensland until the early 1900’s. Now they have started to restore the building. Though much of it was empty there is an art gallery of Willam Robinson on the upper level. He must be a fairly famous local artist, as there were also several of his works in the Queensland Art Gallery, which is what we visited next, after hiking back across the bridge. The most interesting art in the building as far as both Enid and I were concerned were scultpure of large red polar bears in a large pool of water.
Red polar bears, Queensland Art gallery
We wanted to take the City Cat (catamaran ferries that go up and down the Brisbane River) so we walked back to the ferry dock and got on. We took the cat back to where we could catch a bus to bring us back home. The cats are very fast and cost the same as a bus. Unfortunately we missed our bus connection by about 5 seconds, so had to wait an extra 30 minutes for the next bus to come by.
Everything today was free, except for our transportation, which cost us a total of $25. We did do a lot of walking though, almost 12 km in all today.