A Roof with a View

Friendly Brisbane City Youth Hostel

Nearly there dear readers, this is the last but not least blog about Brisbane. Our visit would not have been nearly as enjoyable or memorable had it not been for our stay at the beautiful BCYH and our numerous chats with the lovely, enthusiastic people staying there.

We shared stories with fellow global travellers including lads from America and the Isle of Man while we were cooling off in the rooftop swimming pool, a plasterer from Norwich while we queued for the single working microwave, a fuse had blown the circuit of the other three and numerous people when we sat at the benches for our evening meals. They are travelling with working visas but the general consensus was they would work only as much as required to finance their travels and adventures. Cool.

On our last morning as the colourful trains creaked and squealed around the building we overheard a lady of about our youthful years, who had just arrived from a 10 day camping trip with lots of youngsters and organised by Perth City Youth Hostel into the country and outback on the west coast and was re-telling her experience. What a wonderful way to see the area we thought, maybe it would suit us when we get there.

But in order to facilitate that it was time to get back to Zoonie and start off once more from Mooloolaba. That morning as we left Brisbane it was sinking into a sulphuric cloud of bush smoke, another reminder of the tragedy unfolding all around Australia from just a few miles away. Luckily we were on a Greyhound bus once more because all the rail journeys north of Brisbane had been cancelled with the rail lines closed.

The windows of the bus were heavily tinted with mesh so I gave up on looking at the countryside and had a snooze and back at Moo we had a nice beer and Turkish bread and cheese lunch before descending on Coles supermarket to victual up before setting off, the very next day!