Meandering toward Brisbane

As exhausted as we were, we did not sleep well. We had some home-made cereal for breakfast before packing up and, somewhat tired, started making our way over to Brisbane. Rather than go direct, we decided to explore a bit along the way. And so it was that we stopped at a couple of beaches along the Gold Coast, including the beautiful and vast Kirra beach, where we saw some washed-up stingers. I have no idea how to tell them apart, but this one had a mean blue shade to it.

Dead Blue Stinger

Given that we didn’t have stinger suits, we decided it probably wasn’t really warm enough to go for a swim anyway and headed inland a bit toward Springbrook National park. At one point we decided to take a break from driving and stopped at the “Advance town water reservoir” which turned out to be a nice little lake.

Randomly there was chickens walking around the carpark too…

It wasn’t long after that we got to the Springbrook falls, where we hiked to the waterfalls. They really were spectacular views!

(if you took the pictures just right you could even hide the railing 😉 )

After relaxing for a bit we started on the circuit hike in the park, but after about 20 minutes we decided we were both too tired.  We were about to turn around when we spotted this litte one dancing on the railing – Manja managed to take fantastic photos!

Little Mantis

Hello Mister!

By the time we got back to the car we were ravenous, so we found ourselves some lunch in the nearby “Lost Fawn Cafe” before the somewhat longer drive back to Brisbane.

A bit of a drive through the beautiful Queensland countryside later, we arrived at our accommodation in Brisbane.  We were pleasantly surprised – it was an old mansion run as a professional Bed & Breakfast.  We had a fully equipped room for ourselves, which included Aircon and even had a continental breakfast. For dinner we took a short stroll to a little Sri-Lankan restaurant, which turned out to have pretty decent food and excellent and unusual Milkshake/Smoothie things.

We were so full of food that we decided to go for a bit of a wander around the suburb, in the general direction of town find a little hill to watch the sunset from….  As it turned out that hill was impossible to find and a mosquito filled green area made us turn around and head back to our accommodation. We spent a while updating blogs and relaxing on the porch before retreating into our gloriously climate-controlled room for some sleep.