Today, Cairns! We took the plane from Newcastle, landed mid-afternoon. Timo, Hugo and I enjoyed the swimming pool – even if a bit cold, while Sarah and Séverine went shopping. Timo even did 50 lengths, to swim 1000m for the first time.
After dinner, we took an evening walk in the city center and enjoyed the nice, festive atmosphere of this holiday city. Our plan here includes a trip to the tropical forest and to the coral reef.
We started the day with the Tour de France highlights – not as exciting as the day before but still a good mountain stage. We packed, checked out and went to the nearby Koala Hospital, where we saw lots of rescued koalas. We bought sausage rolls for lunch, another typical Australian thing, that we ate at the Tacking Point lighthouse.
After lunch, we drove along the pacific highway, back to Corlette. It’s good to be back to our base camp, after a week on the road. We watched the sunset on Bagnalls Beach, had diner at Mike’s and went back home to prepare our next trip: Cairns, in northern Queensland.
The day started with the highlights of a fantastic Tour de France stage and an egg-cellent breakfast prepared by the camping staff. It was too windy to go surfing, so we packed, checked out, and delivered the boards back to Chris and Dave. We had a late morning coffee there, talked about our program once in Sydney, Christmas in Bali, and how mentally difficult it is to change plans when we have our mind set on something.
We bought lunch at the Bruns Bakery, said goodbye to the Olsens, left Brunswick Heads, and drove to the Forest Sky Peer over Coffs Harbour for a quick stop.
We arrived at Port Macquarie late afternoon. The kids went to the swimming pool – a very cold one, so cold they had to wear their wetsuits.
We all woke up early to catch the high tide. We borrowed surf and bodyboards from Dave, walked across the bridge to the beach. Water temperature was about 20-21 deg, perfect with a wetsuit. Tim and Sarah tried surfing, with the help of Tom. They both succeeded to stand up and surf the waves a few times.
We had bbq for lunch, with Nel, Chris, Dave and James. A typical Australian bbq: sausage-sizzle. We celebrated Matilda’s 5th birthday with a delicious sponge cake covered by at least 10 cm of pink creamy topping.
We had a coffee and ice-cream downtown, then went back to the beach for an hour of bodyboarding, before the rain forced us back to the cabins.
We picked up Fish and chips takeaway for diner that we ate while watching rugby league on TV – the State of Origin decider’s game between Queensland and New South Wales.
Back to Chris and Nel… I have pretty much always known them, ever since I was born. My parents had bought an old house in the middle of a field in Normandie with them – a very 70s thing to do – where we would spend weekends and holidays when we lived in Paris. I remember playing with Nel and her brother Ollie when I was like 2 or 3, and being puzzled because I could not understand a word of what they were saying. Then we moved away from Paris. The house was sold, eventually, and I didn’t see the Olsen for like 2 decades, except Nel who had spent a few weeks with us later on. This takes me back to my very early childhood.
NB: Thomas took and shared some of the pictures below.
Turns out we were not quite done with Brisbane. We had seen ads for a Disney exhibition at the Queensland Museum, and Sarah really wanted to see it. So we all went! It was a beautiful and captivating exhibition about Disney’s animation movies, the technique, the art, the artists. We were handed out drawing boards at entrance, clearly encouraged to measure our drawings skills against Disney’s artists.
The exhibition was chronological, from the first Mickey Mouse films to the recent digital films. I thought the first part was way more interesting – maybe because of my age? The work on the artistic concepts, the colours, the style, the storyboard, how they worked from the voice recording to the animated movie, all supported by sketches and drawings.
After a quick lunch break along the South Bank, we went to a guided tour of the nearby Art Gallery, taking us through Australian masterpieces of the last 150 years or so, and beautiful aboriginal art from the last 50 years. I understand (but maybe I misunderstood) that Aboriginal Australians only started painting on canvas in the 70s, pretty recently, really. We learnt that, although it looked like abstract art, it’s not – the artist tells a story, a story they own.
We finally left Brisbane, and headed to Burnleigh Head where we meet James, Nathalie’s brother, who lives there. Under a pouring rain, we drove to our next destination, Brunswick Head. We had dinner at Chris Olsen’s, who I hadn’t seen for 20 years. Nothing compared to the 36 years since I had last seen her daughter Nel, who happened to be here as well!
The day started with the highlights of yesterday’s Tour de France stage. It’s routine now. After breakfast, Tim, Alfred and I played some Aussie rules football in the parc across the street.
Our first attraction today was the Coot-Tha lookout, north of Brisbane. A quick stop to enjoy the view, and we went to the nearby Simpson’s waterfall for our lunch break and a short hike to the falls – there wasn’t much water, which puzzled us given the rainfalls just a few day ago.
We then drove to Wellington point, at the very end of a peninsula just east of Brisbane, on the Coral sea. We walked on a narrow, emerged sandbar to King Island, and came back just as the tide was starting to submerge the bar. It’s winter, but 20deg and sunny. Feels like a good summer day in Norway. For locals however, judging from how uncrowded it was at Wellington point, it’s clearly winter.
This ends our stay in Brisbane and the second week of our holidays. Tomorrow we’re heading to Gold Coast and Brunswick Head, a bit further south.
