After my adventures at the Koala Reserve, I spent the day wandering the city. I like to see a city on foot. My favorite method has been to get a few recommendations of good places to check out and then just start walking. I ask directions along the way and stop to take pictures of anything that catches my attention. I did exactly that through the late afternoon in Brisbane.

I was told to go check out South Bank and the Kangaroo Point Cliffs, particularly at dusk. So, I started walking in that general direction and made it to South Bank around 4:30. I stopped along the way to get things like dinner and a beginning guitar book. It was interesting to walk through a city again. It feels so unnecessarily large, but in a comfortably anonymous kind of way.

One of the big differences between Vila and a Western city is in how anonymous, or not, it feels. Walking down a busy street in the West, you are just a drop in the river of humanity. Chances are you don’t know anyone around you and it would take a lot of work to find the six degrees of separation. In Vila, you will bump into people you know every block, the person standing at the bus stop next to you is your cousin-brother who you haven’t met yet. It is a very different feel. It was nice to be anonymous for a day.

The walk along South Bank was pretty. I think if I lived in Brisbane, I would find an excuse to go down there at least once a week for a nice walk or jog. I would have liked to see the Botanical Gardens, but that wasn’t an option, between the flooding and the time constraints. It would have been nice to get some of the plant names in English. I saw a lot of plants I recognized from Vanuatu in Australia and would have liked to get the English names of them. Oh well.

The Kangaroo Cliffs were very pretty, though lacking in Kangaroos. There were a lot of rock climbers out and about. I like the idea of going for a walk in the park, climbing a rock wall and going out for a drink at one of the pubs with a view. Too bad I just went for a walk and a taxi ride to a hotel instead.

Brisbane seems like a nice city. The areas I was in were clean, slightly touristy and very welcoming. At some point, I’d like to go back for a proper visit, not a tour of the hospital.