On the beach, we met up with Sam and Lauren again and made plans to meet up for drinks tonight, as they move on tomorrow. We spent a relaxing few hours on the beach, soaking up the sun and cooling off in the water. On the way back to the hostel we visited an information stand and booked tickets for a sunset cruise for tomorrow night - should be fun! After a quick shower and change, Dave and I went to the 6pm welcome meeting (Kelly wasn't ready!) and enjoyed our...

Today was overcast when we got up so we decided to go and visit a couple of places in the city. Our first stop were the Roma Street Parklands, described as the world's largest subtropical garden in a city centre! It was developed in 2000 on the site of the old Roma Street railway yards and contains thousands of unique species of plants, birds, lizards and fish. The subtropical rainforest area was only part of the park, there was also a lake and an arid garden, fo...

Today was our first day to explore Brisbane, and we decided to use the 'City Cat' ferry to explore the city. The ferry is a form of public transport, so our tickets were only $5 and lasted 2 hours, so we did a big loop of all the stops, and ended up being on it for about 2 and a half hours! We spent sometime on the deck at the front taking photos of the bridges and admiring the path riverside houses. It was really hot (over 30°c), so we sat inside out of the sun...

This morning we were up early to catch our bus to Brisbane and we had a couple of very grumpy drivers along the way! We changed buses in Brisbane and got on one heading for the airport. We'd just sat down when a familiar face headed up the aisle towards us…it was Anais, the French girl who stayed at Chris and Paul's house in Adelaide with us! Since we left her in Adelaide, she's visited Tasmania, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, and was on her way to Noosa, whic...

Our last full day in Surfers Paradise today…so we went to the beach! We had originally planned to go to one of the theme parks today, but decided we didn't want to spend that much ($80 each!). Then we thought we might get the bus to Byron Bay for the day, since we couldn't stay there on our way up the coast (they were fully booked everywhere!)…but then we found out it would cost $46 each for the bus, so that idea was scrapped too! So option 3 was to go to the...