Monday 13th August 2007

We woke up nice and early this morning because, even though you're supposed to give 24 hours notice, we wanted to try and book ourselves onto this morning's 10.30am Greyhound bus to Brisbane (doing it in plenty of time as usual). Nikki rang them as soon as they opened at 8am and luckily they let us on and so we got ready, had some breakfast and then checked out of our hostel. We've been really lucky with our hostel... first they miscalculated the price of our double room, then because they only booked us in for 7 nights we only had to do the cleaning 4 times (instead of 5 - Nikki should've worked today).

When we left the hostel, we took the short walk to the Transit Centre and the Greyhound turned up pretty quickly. The journey to Brisbane only took about an hour-and-a-half and when we got there we rang a couple of hostels (nothing like a bit of pre-planning) and waited for the one we chose, Brisbane City Backpackers, to come and pick us up.

Our hostel is pretty cool! It has an onsite Irish pub, we've got a pretty big (and clean) double room and... we get free wireless internet! Our first impressions of Brisbane, however, are not as good... it just looks like a concrete jungle - with high rise buildings instead of the lovely white beaches we've become used to.

We dumped our bags in our room and then headed into the centre. It only took a couple of minutes to get there and we discovered that Brisbane is a shoppers paradise! It has thousands of shops and loads of food courts (which made Nikki happy). After looking around for a while, we headed over to another hostel, called Bunk, where Adam and Ash were staying. We walked into the reception and were about to ask for them there when I spotted Adam... in the bar!

After a couple of hours catching up with them (Adam has had to ring home and borrow more money off his Mum... supposedly for a car), drinking a jug of Australian beer and playing free pool we said our goodbyes and walked into China Town for a meal. The Chinese meal wasn't that great - but it was cheap, so we were happy. Afterwards we walked back through town, looking in the few shops that were still open, and then came back to our hostel, where I abused the free internet by downloading music, films and TV shows like LOST and Extras.

The stupid cheap Chinese meal gave both of us dodgy stomachs - that'll teach us (well, probably not)!