Brisbane: 2 Parks and Wandering

Brisbane.

I didn’t say Brisbane as some sort of geographical version of Tourette syndrome. Brisbane, Australia is where I am. This visit adds a new city, country, and continent to the list of places I’ve been. Although, with Australia being a continent onto itself, I couldn’t help but add both the country and the continent at the same time.

This will be a short post. Travelling from Toronto to Brisbane took a lot out of me. Even though I slept on the plane, I’m still thoroughly exhausted. So, I didn’t do much today. I visited a botanic garden and a park and wandered around a bit.

Technology Frustration

Exhaustion wasn’t the only reason for my lack of greater activity. Technology decided to hate me today.

When I travel outside of Canada, I use my home cellphone plan for voice and text (apart from iMessage which goes through data) and try to use that sparingly. But I don’t use that plan for data at all when I’m travelling out-of-country.

Instead, I buy an eSIM to provide data. So when I’m in another country, my phone shows two connections: My normal cell line, with data roaming turned off, and an eSIM that doesn’t have a phone number associated with it. It only provides a data connection.

When the plane landed in Brisbane, I turned airplane mode off on my phone. The data eSIM connected right away. My regular physical SIM is connected not at all.

I got to the hotel. The data connection still worked. The voice and text connection still did not.

My cell phone company offers texting-based support that works through Apple iMessage, so it uses data, not SMS text messaging. I was able to use that to contact my cellphone company.

They had me do some troubleshooting that managed to kill my eSIM data connection, without fixing the voice/text connection. Thank you very much. I got the data connection working again on my own.

Long story short, the support session via iMessage went on for a long time. And then the support person just stopped responding.

After overcoming a problem that my hotel had with its WiFi (because of course it would have a problem with its WiFi today), I was able to use WiFi calling to call my cellphone company’s support telephone line for free.

I explained the situation in great detail to the tech support person. He asked me to wait on hold for no more than five minutes while he checked my account. I was on hold for a few minutes. The call then disconnected.

I called back and got a different tech support person. I repeated everything I told the first person. He said, “Let me put you on hold for no more than five minutes while I check your account.” The call dropped much quicker this time. Well, at least it was much more efficient uselessness.

Meanwhile, a new support person came on the iMessage support thread that had been dormant for a while. I had already gone out to explore Brisbane. So my walk was punctuated with the pinging of incoming iMessage texts and my thumbing of outgoing replies, many of which repeated what I already told her and others.

Bottom line: It’s still not resolved. The support person escalated it to her senior tech support team.

By the way, my data-only eSIM still works. I’ve used the same company for eSIMS for several trips now. I won’t say I’ve never had problems with them, but the few problems I’ve had either fixed themselves or they had really easy fixes. The company is Airalo. Airalo has an app in the Apple app store (I assume there’s also an Android version) that makes buying and installing eSIMs relatively easy—not effortless, but not a lot of effort. If you buy an eSIM from them and use referral code “JOEL1240,” Airalo will give you a $3 US credit on your first purchase. (They’ll also give me a matching credit. End of plug.)

If you’re reading this entry, technology might still hate me, but not enough that it blocked me from posting it. Then again, maybe it wants to punish you by putting this in front of your eyeballs.

Brisbane City Botanic Gardens

The Brisbane City Botanic Gardens is free. How can you beat free? And it’s beautiful. How can you beat beautiful? Well, according to a guidebook I’m using on this trip, there’s another botanic garden, also run by the city, out in the burbs that’s even more beautiful. And it’s up on a hill that provides panoramic views. I might try to get out to that one another day.

But this one is right in the central part of the city. And it’s an easy walk from my hotel.

The gardens are quite large and offer several varieties of trees, including several palm trees, a small bamboo grove, and some mangroves beside the Brisbane River. There’s also one fairly densely forested area. The gardens also have large lawns, bushes, flowers, and a small pond with fountains. Lots of paths meander through the park.

A section of a path runs beside the river, without any mangrove stands between them.

All in all, I quite enjoyed my visit to the City Botanic Gardens. It would have been very relaxing, had it not been for the nagging support exchanges with my cell phone company. Harumph.

South Bank Parklands

The South Bank Parklands is an eclectic park that runs alongside the Brisbane River. There’s a Ferris wheel with glass-enclosed cabs. A small simulated rainforest. A few different swimming areas. A children’s play area. Some lawns. A small retail/restaurant area. And a Nepalese Peace Pagoda left over from the 1988 Brisbane World’s Fair. In short, there’s something for everyone.

And there’s the river to add a nice border to one side of it.

When I read about the Ferris wheel, known as the Wheel of Brisbane, before going there I thought it would be like the London Eye, which I have been on. However, the Wheel of Brisbane looks more like a standard Ferris wheel, but with enclosed cabs. And those enclosed cabs have tinted windows. And they seat up to six people in a cab. It appears there’s room for three people on each side of the cab. So, if you are on the inside, I doubt you get much of a view through the tinted windows on the other side of the people sitting in front of you. I didn’t think it was worth the more than $20/adult fee, so I didn’t go on.

(P.S.: Am I the only one who thinks “Wheel of Brisbane” sounds like an Australian spinoff of “Wheel of Fortune?”)

Wandering

Between the telco tech headaches and my extreme fatigue, I didn’t do a lot of other wandering around and I didn’t pay as much attention as I would have if I were awake and not aggravated. But I did do some and I wasn’t 100 percent out of it when I did. Maybe 80 percent. 90 tops.

The impression I have is the river is the city’s core. And while I think its course is mostly natural, it’s almost as if a being designed its path. A staggering, fall-down-pissing-drunk being.

Most of the part of Brisbane that the river runs through is fairly flat. I came across one modest hill in the central part of the city. But it doesn’t seem to play much of a role in shaping the course of the river.

Nevertheless, the Brisbane River twists and turns, including one near-hairpin curve. If an intelligent designer architected the river, the designer should lay off the booze. It’s killing too many brain cells.

Aside

The Other Side of the World

As noted above, I am now in Brisbane, Australia. It feels like I spent half my life getting here. I’m probably wrong about that. I’m 70. I don’t think I spent any more than ten years on the journey, not 35.

Alright, yes. That’s a touch of an exaggeration. In reality, my journey started with a five-hour flight from Toronto to Vancouver, Canada. Then, after an almost three-hour layover in Vancouver, I boarded a flight that took about 15 hours to fly to Brisbane non-stop.

The point is, I’m far from home.

If you took a 13,000-kilometre-long, un-meltable pin and shoved it into the ground in Toronto, through the centre of the Earth, and out the other side, I have no idea if it would poke up into Australia. But, if not, it probably wouldn’t be too far off Australia’s coast. At least, not too far relative to the size of the globe, that is.

Why you would do this, where you’d get an un-meltable pin that long, and how you could push it through the Earth is a mystery to me. Work that out for yourself. I’ll have no part in your endeavour.

Think about this. If I stood on the ground in front of my home and a clone of mine stood at the appropriate point on the other side of the world, we’d be mirror images of each other. Of course, if that point on the opposite side of the world isn’t in Australia, but rather in the ocean, my clone would drown. But that’s not my problem.

All that being said, I’m pleased to report that, despite being on the other side of the world from where I stand and sit with no problem back home, I haven’t fallen off the earth. Yet. Isn’t gravity grand?

That’s it. I desperately have to go to sleep now.