When you arrive in a city late in the day, as we did in Brisbane on Sunday, there's not enough time to get your bearings and explore properly and you might be left with a less than flattering opinion of the place. (viz Hereford...)

So I apologise to Brisbane for my earlier comments comparing it to Birmingham (and to Birmingham for using it as a benchmark for badness) and am thankful for the full couple of proper exploring days before leaving for Sydney.

Brisbane is called the River City and so, in addition to the normal ways of exploring which give you the flavour of anywhere new (by walking, by public transport, eating and drinking, from somewhere high up, etc), this city has to be explored by river.

You can do this fairly easily in Brisbane, because the river is an integrated part of the public transport system. The River Cat...



...darts happily up and down the river from very early to very late. The ticket for the sightseeing bus includes unlimited river travel, so we did some unlimited river travel.

And it turns out that Brisbane is actually very nice...

Lots of desireable, and very expensive, waterfront properties...



(This one, it turns out, is not as old as it looks. It was built in 1980 by a member of the Lloyds Insurance family. He spends most of the year away on business so, as the guide told us, the live-in housekeeper and the gardeners have the whole place to themselves for much of the year.)

Brisbane has an industrial history...



(Brisbane Powerhouse: Now an arts centre à la Tate Modern)



(Now swanky apartments)

And it has old Coloninial buildings a-plenty...



...nestled in between the very new, very high and, apparently, very secure office blocks...

(Thanks to Peter, who has helpfully commented on some of my Brisbane photos to tell me what they are...!)

It was now about 4pm and I may have given up listening to the iPod by now, but I imagine it had reached something along the lines of "The Wreck of the Sloop John B".

For this was Shipwreck Coast (®) and there are three major things to see here. For now, anyway. This is because the coastline is as it is because of massive erosion of the sandstone by the relentless Southern Ocean on a big exposed bit that doesn't have the luck to be protected by Tasmania.

And so you get these massive stack formations where bit of land have been left as the cliff had tumbled into the sea around them.

The most famous is The Twelve Apostles...



...and you can guess what's coming - there are now only eleven because one of them had the temerity to fall into the sea. But hey, they only changed the name from "The Sow and her Piglets" a few years ago so that they didn't have a tourist attraction named after farm animals and now they've had the sings done, the maps printed, the helicopters painted...

It can only be a matter of time before another huge chunk of cliff disappears, probably taking a few hundred tourists with it, and they can have twelve again...

Next westward is Loch Ard Gorge...



...two inlets, one of which is protected by this (near to collapse, I should guess) lump of red rock. Apparently it looks like a question mark from the air. There are two ways to check this. One is to pay $$$ and make Jeff another small percentage by going on the ludicrously short helicopter flight. And the other is Google Maps...



Handily, the Google Maps high resolution photography extends just shy of the question mark in question, so it's either the helicopter of take Jeff's word for it... It's the bit where the shipwreck was anyway. The most famous one anyway - there were 85 over something like 60 years. (It was definitely that way round 'cos he said "that's more than one a year...") This one had a Titanic style rich boy/poor girl/other way round possibly love story attached to it where one saved the other and wanted to get married but the other one went back to Ireland and they never saw each other again. I'm inclined not to believe some of the stories told by tour guides.

Finally, and the most south and west I'm going in Australia, is London Bridge - another rock formation which looks like this:



However, prior to 1990, it looked like this...



A couple had just walked over onto the right hand bit when the first arch collapsed. Someone telephoned the police to say that "London Bridge had fallen down" and understandably, the police thought they were hoaxers and took ages getting there. In the meantime, the TV network helicopters had picked up the information on short wave radio and there was a big race to get out there. Several arrived to get the first interview, but none of them could rescue them because they wouldn't have been covered for insurance purposes - the married couple had to wait for the official rescue helicopter.

Unfortunately, it transpired that the married couple weren't actually married to each other. They were away on a little illicit getaway - and they had also pulled sickies from work. Not good when you have the helicopters from several TV networks hovering above you...

This was Jeff's story, so it could have had embellishment, although he did say that several weeks earlier, BMW had hired the land and their new range was lined up along London Bridge and shot from the air for a new advertising campaign. Trucks and cars and support vehicles had been driven over, parked, driven back again. Three weeks later, the arch collapsed...

This is what you get for carrying two tonnes of adapters around the world...



Yes, Hong Kong, you may be Chinese now, but some things are still reassuringly British.

Actually, I suppose we did. You can't really blame the Chinese.

Up on The Peak, some guy was hawking old black and white photos alongside a modern day colour one so you could play Hong Kong Spot the Difference. Quite developed in the fifties, but no real high-rise buildings... Now every square inch is packed with skyscrapers - office blocks...



...and apartment blocks (what the tour guide called "kissing apartments" - so close to each other, you could kiss the person in the neighbouring block...)



Before any buildings, you could imagine what the harbour looked like, sailing in, between the islands, it would have been steep, rocky hillsides, covered in forest. A real paradise. But now it's so dense...

On the plus side, you can walk between adjacent buildings and through their (thankfully air-conditioned) lobbies via covered, elevated walkways. You can get round most of the central business district like this - no-one seems to walk at street level.

After walking, the main way of getting around seems to be ferries across the harbour. The Star Ferries between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island cost HK$2 - the equivalent of about 14p. And as well as a public transport route, the harbour is a big tourist attraction. An evening cruise on a Chinese-Style Junk (pushing it, that description, really - it was a motorised, split-level boat with bar) means you can see what the city looks like as it lights up...



(*Note to self... consider travel plans more carefully when opting to go somewhere where it's hotter at 9pm than it ever gets during the summer in the UK...)

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