Capital of Queensland (the big state in the north east of Australia)

We had left hip Byron Bay and took the bus again to Brisbane. Here is where Silja would fly out to Japan and I would start traveling "alone" again.

Brisbane is another big city. Many big buildings and is situated around a river, like most big cities of Australia (source of fresh water!). Silja and I stayed in a big hostel, which was okay, not particurlarly good but yeah fine. The room was dark (no windows), so sleeping was great, but not that nice otherwise)
In Brisbane we didn't really know what to do, we were thinking about going to an island, a friend recommended, but when we realized it was quite far away and we'd have to leave early we decided not to (we ended up just having that one day).

I loved this church! It was so small and looked rather old and was surrounded by these huge modern skyscapers

A sea of plush kangaroos, koalas and other animals found in a souvenir shop :D

Instead we did a walk around town, visited the big botanical garden park, saw some mangroves, that grow around the river and strolled through the CBD. In the afternoon we sent a package back to Germany, wow it's expensive! 80$ for seamail and less than 7 kg. SIlja wanted to get rid of a bag and some other things, I just cashed in and sent some things back too. Though we were not comfortable with the package. It was a bit folded like a moving crate I know in Germany, but was 1000 times less stable. We packed it and while I was carrying it back to the post office the bottom just slid open and everything fell out on the bottom, like one of those slap stick moments in the movies. Just for real. Wow.
We told that to the post officer, so she'd tape it up real good, but she didn't really. I hope it gets wrapped better later on. Anyway, it's on its way and could arrive by now (we sent it beginning/middle of may) or take much longer (up to 3 months, is what they told us).

The mangroves in the park - it had just stopped raining so I didn't take more pictures =(

In the evening we went to a few pubs and ended up doing a drag queen bingo game evening. That was pretty fun an d a dutch girl we met in the hostel actually won! She got a "sausage platter" (though it was just a few sausages and more of other things). In all it was a cool last evening for Silja (or at least I thought it was cool). The next morning she left and I went on to Noosa, another hip town only north of Brisbane.