We had to keep pushing further south and crossed the state border to New South Wales and therefore only had a brief stop in Byron Bay which reminded me of Noosa. I was getting a bit bored of the beach-small-backpacker/tourist towns at this point because they all began to look like each other. It was over-run by run down campervans and tanned people in slinky clothing. I didn’t mind only spending a few hours there and moving on. A little further was the town of Ballina. There’s nothing there so they built a restaurant right next to the main road but to attract patrons they built a giant shrimp on top of it. This big thing was sadly one of the more impressive ones.

We stayed at Lennox Head that night and then continued south towards Coffs Harbour, but we didn’t quite make it there since we stopped at a campsite before Coffs Harbour.  We spent the rest of the day skipping rocks on the beach, jumping on the jumping pillow, and trying to make friends with a few resident wallabies who were less friendly than the ones at the zoo.

Jumping pillow

Coff’s Harbour is home to the first of Australia’s big things, the big banana. It’s located next to a banana plantation and also now an amusement centre which contain an artificial ski slope, an ice skating rink, tobogganing and a monorail tour of the banana plantations. We didn’t do any of the activities or buy any really tacky souvenirs shaped like bananas, and you name it they had it in banana shape and color.

The Harbour itself is really pretty and there is an island, called Muttonbird Island, which is connected to the harbour by a manmade breakwater so everyone walks to the island and has a short hike around it, which is well worth doing. A real-scale model of Captain Cook’s ship the ‘Endeavour’ made the scenery even more beautiful and ironically we had seen the same ship in Sydney in Darling Harbour. It is a museum and we wanted to go in because we didn’t visit it in Sydney but the exhibit only opened the next day and we had to be in Port Macquarie by then.

Brisbane is a nice city but I felt it tried to copy other cities instead of having its own thing. For instance it has a replica of the London Eye right along the river which also cost an exorbitant amount to ride so if I didn’t want to pay an arm and a leg to see London, I was definitely not going to ride the “Brisbane Eye.” As opposed to London there was no line whatsoever to ride the as it claims “largest Ferris wheel in the Southern Hemisphere.”

Also around the Brisbane River is an area that very much resembles Darling Harbour, which was not comparable but it felt like Brisbane was having an identity crisis.

We also visited the parliament because Hendrik is into government buildings, as for me after this trip I’ve had enough of government buildings and seeing the red senate and the green house.

Brisbane is definitely trying to be a nice city and a tourist destination, but the problem is there just isn’t that much to do so the one day was plenty of time to see it.