Journey of Life

The curtain's is closing! We were in the final day of the eastern Australia trip, how times flies. Twelve days spent would certainly not enough! Our inbound flight backed home scheduled at 9-ish in the evening, from the Gold Coast airport. The Chemist Warehouse store is the best place to get varieties of fragrance. I got some from Windsor branch after check-out from the Terrace on Gregory apartment. Then, we decided to go back to South Bank Parkland. We visited the Queensland Museum that mostly exhibits cultural and natural heritage of Queensland. You can judges from the pictures below... The free admission museum also held permanent science-related exhibition called SparkLab. A minimal fee required for that.

Time was apparently envious of us. Second day in Brisbane was much of visited interesting places in the vicinity in the evening. My wife attended the ICCAE event at the Rydges Fortitude Valley after breakfast until the late of afternoon. Nu'man and I contended to walk around the neighborhood. There was an Old Museum, 100 meters away from our apartment, we was about to sightseeing. But not until I realized that it used to be a museum, now homed the Queensland Youth Orchestras. The old building was quite nice though. Approaching the afternoon, I cooked for the lunch. Nu'man had almost that day in the swimming pool. He has got acquainted with the resident's kids while I watched the Winter Olympic Games held in Pyeongyang, South Korea. I got my chances to start blogging, even though I know it would took months to complete the 12-days visit to the eastern Australia.

The first day in Brisbane was rather packed. In the morning, we spent the drizzling day on the Mount Coot-tha 10 km to the west of CBD. The mount is part of the Taylor Mountain Range, west of Brisbane’s city center and is a listed Heritage Site. Coot-tha is also known as One Tree Hill and the lookout point was established as early as 1918. Among the attraction we visited were the Botanic Gardens, Herbarium and Sir Thomas Planetarium and the Cosmic Skydome. More than 2 hours we took to explore, walk through the bamboo groove, the ornamental pond and even is has an outstanding Japanese garden.

It would rather a short stay in Moreton Island, considering a lot of things you can do. From snorkeling around the dramatic shipwrecks, to the sand tobogganing in the desert. We only enticed with the dolphin feeding program, other than we had the desert experience last year. We had to depart for Brisbane at 1.30-ish. Nu'man insisted to swim in the sea that morning, despite non-stop raining since yesterday. I just followed his wished. We hopped in to the photo shop to check whether our's are ready to pick up. The resort provide official professional photographer to capture that precious moment. Little that we know about the Tinkerbell's dolphin family, until we got out pictures. We took pictures with Betts and Calypso on 1st encounter, Echo and Nari, next!

It wasn't a whale watching season right now, and it only starts early June until late of October. It is one of the must-do/see while you were in eastern Australia. Missed that one but at least we have a reason to come back. The alternative...? Dolphin feeding, sound interesting though! Tangalooma Island Resort operates the wild dolphin feeding program each evening at the sunset. The nightly attendance of bottle-nose dolphins swim to the beach near the Tangalooma jetty. For those who stay in the resort, or taking a day-cruise by the resort, got a chance to hand feed the wild dophins!

First, Gold Coast famous with amusement park as I mentioned in the earlier post, then the coastal city rich with a long-stretched white-sandy beaches. It also referred to as "the green behind the gold", where the Tamborine Mountain and the Springbook are located. Currumbin and Numinbah Valley are also not-to-skip place for those who love nature. We decided to no-go for the nature, we had much of it on the Blue Mountain, and we would have island vacay on the next day. That will cover on later post. So we opted for outlet shopping and then wandered the Surfers' Paradise in the evening.

Hoping that the weather would be nice Gold Coast is known for it's theme park. We were contemplated between Dreamworld and Warner Bro's Movie World. Some reviews said that the rides are bigger and balder, the Dreamworld. But then we finally decided on the Movie World. Yeahh.. there are others attraction like Sea World, Wet 'n Wild and the list goes on... The park opens at 10 am, but we arrived early, it was 20 minutes from The Shore. The sky started to show that it would be raining soon. Anyhow, we should stay indoor in the theme park. Since I didn't made any reservations early or booked online, we just joined the not so long ticketing counter queue. After getting the park's map, we started with the farthest section since we don't want to join the crowd. It wasn't too many riders as compared to others theme park that we've been so far. The wait wasn't too long.

  Mak, can I fly this? Original planned was to have coastal walk between Bronte and Bondi in the early morning, luckily we had done that on the first day, else we would be in rushed. It was really not a coastal walk, but we did spend that evening laying over the Bondi beach. We took our sweet time with the breakfast and only arrived Sydney airport at 11 am, after the hotel checked-out (most of the hotels here have 10 am check-out policy). The flight, which was scheduled to depart in the afternoon, was delayed for an hour and half.  We spent almost 5 hours waiting in the airport and only arrived at Coolangatta airport, Gold Coast ten past 5 pm.

The entire of this day was set aside to explore the city center. Initially, we planned to explore the Hyde Park and Domain vicinity on the first day. Because most museums closed at 5 pm and we were still tired of the flight, we might not able to make it. Saved it for later, we had a lot of thing to do this day. The biggest highlight other than Hyde Park and domain were the Royal Botanic Garden, Circular Quay (though we've been here yesterday) and of course the city center vicinity. We skipped some of the less attractive sites, and pessimistic think that we could cover the Rock neighborhood in the afternoon.

Taking picture with Kat. On the second day, we joined Blue Mountains tour with Anderson. It was all-inclusive small group tour that we didn't have to worry about the entrance tickets as well as the lunch meal. Everything has been taken care by Kat, our friendly and knowledgeable on everything about Aussie. She was very attentive to each of us and always had something to tell down the road to the Blue Mountains As our lodge located outskirt, we woke up early in the morning just to have enough time to be at the pick-up point by 7 am. We stopped at the Wynyard metro station and walked for about half kilometers to the Four Seasons Hotel. The Circular Quay station should be nearer to the pick-up point, but then the station was closed for reasons that we were not aware of. We just relied on the Google Maps suggestion. The shuttle picked us in front of the hotel around 7:20 am, nonetheless. The journey took almost two hours to reach the Scenic World. In between, Kat did a brief stop...

Yeaaa dah sampai sydney! G'day mate! We just came back from the trip to the eastern part of Australia during the Chinese New Year holiday. Our late night Air Asia X flights arrived in Sydney the next morning. It was late summer season so the weather has been nice to us. However, we heard in the news that some part of the Sydney's suburbs get flooded, while we were in Brisbane. Having set aside 3 nights stayed in Edgecliff, that would never been enough time to visit all the interesting attractions in Sydney. After getting the Optus sim card for Nu'man, we took a cab upon checking that the airport train fare were much less the same. We checked-in to the Edgecliff Lodge, and the instant noodle just enough for the lunch as we took heavy breakfast in flights. Though it was summer, most of the museums and attractions were close pretty early. There was no way we can spend the remaining time visiting the attractions around the city center.