Saturday 28 September 2024 – The last couple of days haven’t been photo-worthy, because we’ve spent them talking to friends, rather than seeing new sights.  Yesterday was our final day with Phil, Christine, Bella and Lilli the Cavoodle; the day before was our chance to catch up with Dell and Richard, who have a delightful place on a 5-acre patch in Anstead, some 20-odd kilometres west-sou-west of Brisbane.  Richard and Jane were colleagues in the early years of this, our third millennium, and, again, it was a pleasure to discover that they lived near enough to make it relatively easy to meet up. Meet up we did; they treated us to a lunch which featured excellent food but, sadly, the only occurrence of indifferent service we’ve encountered in all of our travels across Australia. Whatever her back story was, the lass who served us gave out the strong vibe that she was there under protest. It didn’t, however, spoil the meal; and it was a real pleasure to catch up with Dell and Richard, see their splendid house and be impressed by the work that Richard puts in on knocking the area into shape and keeping it that way; an excellent day out.

Our plans meant that we now, and somewhat sadly, had to leave Brisbane and head up to Cairns.  Before I close the file marked “Brisbane”, though, there is one more set of photos to show and discuss, stemming from a visit we made a couple of days ago to the lookout on Mount Coot-Tha, a 220m hill which is just 8km west of central Brisbane and therefore offers a great view over the city.

(The smoke on the right of the picture above was from a fire at an abandoned warehouse; no-one hurt, apparently, except possibly the insurance company.)

Phil and I have been to Mount Coot-Tha every time I’ve visited him (this is the third occasion); on the previous visit, in 2001, I had with me my first digital camera (for the record, a Canon Digital Ixus) and I took a photo of the view. Not a brilliant one, as it turns out, but one can get enough out of it to compare how it was then

to how it is now.

There are a couple of building identifiably the same in each.

Quite some change, eh?

To supplement these, I had also got aerial shots of the city from the plane: 2001

and 2024.

The two photos were taken on different sides of the sharp bend in the river, but again show how much development has happened over the last quarter of a century.

Enough, already, of Brisbane, then: time to move on. For the second time in a row, Virgin Australia failed to bugger us about and we had an uneventful flight to Cairns, where Avis had a nice Toyota Camry (Hybrid, naturally, dahling) waiting for us. We had a leisurely one-hour drive to the Thala Beach Nature Reserve, past beautiful turquoise seas

and arrived there with time to have some of Twinings Finest  Earl Grey and relax before dinner. Thala Beach looks like a fine place; one approaches through a coconut palm plantation

and I can vouch for the quality of the bar

and the restaurant, which provided a great meal, a hint of some of the wildlife that we hope we’ll be able to see – and, of course, photograph –

(Google lens says these are cormorants. It’s wrong, I’m sure; I hope we’ll find out the truth in due course – we suspect they may be Helmeted Friarbirds) and some nice colours as the sun went down.

After dark, we participated in a stargazing session led by a lady whose great enthusiasm and obvious grasp of the subject didn’t quite offset her very irritating delivery style. I got my first decent view of Saturn through her 10″ telescope, along with a view of a globular cluster. I tried for photos, but I just got a picture of these stars, you know? On the way back to our cabin, we saw a cane toad,

and we’ll have a chat with reception about reporting it, since it’s such an invasive and dangerous creature.

Tomorrow offers us a day at leisure, and plan A is to visit Port Douglas. Apart from anything else, supplies of Earl Grey are running low, but I suspect that we’ll probably, or even obviously, go for a walk there. Tune in later to find out.