Day 227 (Friday 24/06) - Brisbane & Surfers Paradise ...

Wake up at 6:20am.

Pick up opposite the hostel at 7am, heading to Surfers Paradise (~1h drive).

Today I'm going for some whale watching, something I wanted to do 6 months ago, but the weather was too bad, and the migrating season was over ...

In the bus, there's only one girl, Adelaide, from Paris.
The driver is cool, we talk quite a lot, then he puts his music (Stradivarius, kind of gothic-metal Finnish band, lol).

The sky is cloudy today, but at least it's not raining.

Once in Surfers, we head to the river, where a boat is waiting for us.
There are also some other people, in the end we'll be around 20 on board.

We're going on the river, up to the ocean.

one of Jackie Chan's summer house ... oolala ...

We go for around 20min away from the land and already start spotting whales.
Legislations prohibit the boat from getting closer than 100m from the whales, but if they come to us, it's ok.
At the beginning we only see a bit of the whales (3 swimming next to each other).
It's hard to take some good pictures ...

After a while, we move to another place a bit further, where there's another whale spotting boat already there.

Once there, for we don't know what reason (probably to mark her territory), a whale really starts to show off by hitting the water with it's tail, and jumping out of the water. It's really cool and impressive (but again, so hard to take good pics !).

At some point she heads towards us, and gets really close to the boat, we have a really good view of it.
Nice.

We stay there for a while, and are quite lucky as we can really see the whale well.
Meanwhile, the guide (who's also the bus driver from Brisbane), explains us many things about whales.
Pretty interesting.

After a few hours, we get back to Surfers, where we have 2 hours to spend before heading back to Brissie.

With Adelaide we go for a walk, and meet a friend of her who just got in Surfers today (Amanda from Germany).
We go to eat something, and then for a walk on the beach (good to be on a beach again, I missed them already :-) ).

The sky is still covered, but the weather is ok (not too cold, not too windy).
A bit later, a friend from Amanda joins us, another German girl.
We stay a bit on the beach.

After that, with Adelaide we go to our rendez-vous point, where the bus is waiting for us to go back to Bris.
Once there, we're dropped at our hostels.

I then go for a walk in the centre.

Later on I go to eat something out, then go to the Riverside part of the city to meet with Margot, the French girl I met in Adelaide almost 3 months ago.

She finished her exams yesterday, and we arranged to go out for a drink.

We first go to the Bavarian Cafe for a beer, but as it's too crowded, we decide to move somewhere else.

We head to South Bank, the "beach" side of the city, to a nice bar with live music (blues/rock).
The atmosphere is really good, we stay there for a while.

We then leave as Margot has to catch her bus to get home (as we leave it starts raining ... Pfff).

I walk back to my hostel and go to sleep.