Venture to Australia

Heaven and Earth

Today I went to the City. Every Sunday there is a very small market of about 20 booths where they sell everything from paintings to opal jewelry. There's even a booth where you can get a 10 - 30 min massage for $10 - $30 from a registered massage therapist. There's also live music going on in the afternoon for local bands where they sell their latest cd's and promote the band.


After walking around for a bit I hopped on the bus to the Botanical Gardens at the top of Mt. Cootha which is about a 15 -20 min bus ride from the City Centre; from there I had booked myself to go on the Heaven and Earth tour.

The tour started at the front of the gardens and we walked around with a tour guide to see a small portion of the gardens. You can view more photos from the garden in my Flickr photo album. We walked along the path where our guide, Denis, who happens to be a retired school teacher talked to us about a few of the plants we walked by. Some of which were quite odd, for example the Elephant Apple tree, the green tough skinned fruit weighs at least a pound or two, definitely not one that you'd want to be standing underneath during a wind storm.

We also passed the Cow tree which got it's name for the sap that is contained within the trunk, which can be used to make yogourt, yes that's right, yogourt from tree sap.

I'd like to go back to the gardens again to spend a little more time walking around and see the bonsai trees and the rest of the plants and trees that are in bloom.


This is a flower that I took a photo of right outside the rainforest greenhouse.

After the tour we had afternoon tea at the restaurant where they served light sponge cake with cream, jam and coffee or tea.

Then it was off to the planetarium for the "Are we alone?" show which included a tour of the night sky in Brisbane. We were shown the Southern Cross which always shows you where the South is and the constellations Scorpio and Libra.

posted by Compmouse @ 8/28/2005 07:50:00 PM