A day + 5 - 5 December - Brisbane

Since the bad weather continued in the Nooby beach where we were staying, we checked the weather report and decided to go and visit Brisbane, one hour car ride north from whee we were.
Twenty minutes after we left the apartment we had the first taste of Sun for the day




It was short llved though since the clouds came back... When we arrived to Brisbane it was lunch time and Dominik took us to this nice turkish restaurant




Although was raining was very nice to have lunch outside protected from the rain.

After lunch we went to Brisbane Botanical Gardens and before arriving we crossed the Public Park where they have this nice public swimming pool




The photo doesn't do justice to the size of the pool, which had lifeguards and rescue service. It is at least three times the size of what you see in that picture.
After that we crossed one of the many bridges of the Brisbane rivers and we arrived at the Botanical Gardens








The gardens occupied a large are and were full of interesting species. It was there we saw the Gold Orb Weaver spider we posted on the Spiders special report.
Here is one of the plants we admired




There were also very funny looking birds


And of course the ever present Ibis birds



You can see these flying around everywhere in the cities here in Queensland.

And of course there where this gigantic threes all over the place. the one in the next picture is from the Ficus family







After we left the gardens we headed to the Brisbane downtown are with its tall modern architecture buildings contrasting with some colonial style ones











And here is the downtown skyline from the other bank of the river




We really enjoyed visiting Brisbane since It seemed a modern city with very nice relaxing nature places! How cool would it be reading papers in the Botanical Garden? The lucky guys from the School of Business from one of the Universities in Brisbane can do it since their campus is at the Botanical Gardens! And one other university has its campus in the public park ;-)

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Spiders special report

Here am I controling my own revulsion over spiders to show you these images. As you know I'm an arachnophobe and coming to Australia I was expecting to find a lot of spiders. As soon as I arrived at the airport and even before passing costums we saw this giant ad saying "Did you know that Australia has more than 2000 different species of spiders?" and shown a cartoon of a room filled with diferent spiders and webs. Things were not looking good for me at that time and I even didn't thought of taking a picture of the ad...

However, since I've been here my phobia as been controled as I only see small spiders near the apartaments (I've been lucky I know..but lets keep it that way ;-) )

But there was one spider I was curious to see , the Gold Orb Weaver , and I've spoted one of it's nets 10 meterrs afar at teh Brisbane Botanical Gardens. From the safety of my telephoto lenses I manages this photo





And a much braver Filipa went up to the beast and got this one


The size of this spider was about 12cm lenght including the legs and 6 cm sideways!

At Noosa National Park Filipa also managed a couple of good photos of smaller (5-6 cm) spiders






Since they were very still and very visible I managed to safely pass then at 2 meters length but I have to admit they have amazing patterns in their bodies.

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A day + 4 - 4 December

In this day the rain continued in all its soggy might, but the temperature remained in the high twenties. So we started the day having a short walk from our appartment to a coffee house in the main road were we had free wi-fi and nice coffee



As you can see the iPad is very useful as we were checking the last days photos while Derek was checking his email and Dominik using a remote desktop program to check if his laptop back at his university was still doing his work for him ;-)

In the walk back was when we saw all the blue bottle jellyfish you saw ithe Jellyfish special report. In the next photo you can see what the lifeguard information looks like



Here in this region you are only allowed to swim between the flags they stick in the sand and where surfer's are not allowed. Although we saw lots of jellyfish no warning was in the board and we only saw warnings at the lifeguard's watchtower near our apartment.

Since our friends had rented the surf boards and Derek was decided to surf , they put on their wet suits and on they went to the beach. Miriam was the surf teacher for the day





And Derek managed pretty good for a learning surfer!







And here is the teacher



And on to the typical surfer photo



There was also a very pro looking Kite surfer



On the wildlife side, The puffer fish on the other blog post was also found while they were surfing. We also found Goose Barnacles similar to the Perceves we have in Portugal but much more colorful.



In the evening we went do downtown Surfers Paradise were even the street benchs are shaped like surf boards



And we could admire the skyscrapers




Surfers Paradise is a amazingly strange area, since it was built for tourism only and where is very difficult to even find a residential building for locals (I even doubt they exist). Basically it is a land of contrasts filled with hotels in huge skycrapers neighboring cheap looking motels. The same happens to restaurants where classy looking restaurants are almost door to door with fast food places with cuisine from all over the world. The large majority of tourists here are asians, mainly japanese and koreans.

We ended the day at this nice Thay restaurant were we had authentic feast





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A day + 3 - 3 December

At the 3rd day and since rain didn't stop we decided to make the trip to Byron Bay tom see the views. Byron Bay is another small city that is a surfer and hippie mecca, with small houses and surf shopsmall over the place.







This is one of the views of the beach..it had about 10 km and there were less than 50 persons in the area we made pur picknick lunch. Our friends told us that was an australian full beach and you can see from the picture that no one is in sight!

There we saw our first blue bottle jellyfish



And we also saw the most amazing creature ever:



In the photo it doesn't seem much but this critter is a Glaucus atlanticus, the most amazing sea slug that we ever saw! We will try to get a picture of one open, as soon as possible! As ypu can see in the picture it has the most amazing colors!

At the beach we also saw the ubiquitous surfes catching some waves






And then we made a nice trek to the Byron Cape Lighthouse to see the views and on the way we got to the most easterly point in Australia.







As you can see in the last picture the sub-tropical jungle extends all the way to the beach!

After that we had a nice snack at a small cafe in downtown Byron Bay with this amazingly weird paintings



And they also made art in the latte cups :-)


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Puffer Fish

Another australian wildlife special report that we need to share with you:
Today at tHe beach in front our apartments we found another exotic and strange species. Here are the pictures of the Puffer fish we found. it was quite light and it was kind of dry and and had a bony feel!

































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A day + 2 - 2 December

The day started very early after going to bed quite late due to deciding in what to do and where to go since the bad weather foiled our initial plans of a road trip from Canberra to Byron Bay, stoping along several places in the road to north.
After much consideration we decided to get flights to the Gold Coast ( just south or Brisbane) and rent an apartment and a van there to drive around. Federica ( a coleague of Dominik and Miriam) joined us in the trip and we would meet Derek, a friend of Dominik, that flew in from Singapura and would meet us in Sydney. Since the flights were at 12h20 we had to wake at 6h30 to get out of Canberra around 8h, and then have about 3 hours drive to Sydney to catch our flight.
So we finally had our rendez-vous with Derek at Sydneys terminal for National flights and we were on our way trying to see the Sun...
It was a 1h30 flight to Brisbane and during take of we managed to finally see Sydney's harbour including the famous Bridge and Opera House.
After renting a Van at the airport and around 14h, we finally arrived to our rented apartment






On the way there our friends rented 2 surfboards and wetsuits and we've passed some typical australian christmas decorations:













After a while we were all at beach and although was still cloudy, the water temperature was around 23C and I trying to catch some waves:






In the background you can see the impressive skyline of Surfer's Paradise:



So after a long day and more than 1000km apart from where we started we finally took our first dive at the Pacific Ocean!


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Jellyfish special report

Before continuing the daily updates I have to share this with you.

Remember the dangerous Blue bottle jellysfish also known as Portuguese Man'o'War ?

We saw the first small ones yesterday in Byron Bay and today we walked from the cafe back home ( still in the rain :-( ) we just saw all these Jellyfish:




The beach was covered with this things all over the sand were the water front reaches! These small ones shouldn't be (too) dangerous since the lifeguard still allows swimming and you can see surfers in the water.

And there were the bigger ones that should be much more dangerous:














Look at the size of those tentacles! If you push then with something you then notice that the sand is stained in blue!

They are also all other sort of jellyfish around:















So we will be skipping going to the water...

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