Paul's Oriental Travelogue

Bris-bane keeps away the Mohel

Brisbane's getting the Adelaide Treatment. A stay of less than a day and a visit to a tourist attraction involving alcohol.

I probably should have planned for more time in Queensland. As it it is, I was going to get the 9:00 bus from Byron Bay this morning but I narrowly missed it. Brisbane's only three hours away so that's ok, right? Well no. I still had to pick up my plane tickets at an STA Travel office in Brisbane and they'd probably close at five or half past. The next bus from Byron Bay left at 1:30 (I could have sworn there was one for 11:45).

With a sense of impending doom, I walked down the road to get a soda to drink while checking my email. On the way back I passed a guy hawking Express Bus rides to Brisbane that took only two hours.

"Hey, how about today?" I said.

"Uh yeah, eleven o'clock okay?" he replied. Done and done.

I had just enough time to "log on" and see that Apple will fail to deliver on 3Ghz G5s before the end of summer, and I was off to Queensland.

Now I have traveled to every mainland Australian state and territory overland. Even without Tasmania, it seems like something of an achievement.

Brisbane is a nice enough town, the third largest by population in Australia. The flowery fragrant air up north here (where it's warmer!) reminds me that it's not Impending Doom -- I mean autumn -- everywhere. In that way it reminds me of Los Angeles: a city holding out against the weather of its continent; a city of little history and few attractions; a city whose main attraction is that it is a city and in the right place at the right time; a city and a state whose inhabitants are mocked around Australia for being vapid, stupid, insane, or usually all three.

I took a quick walk around, marvelled at the old State Treasury which has been converted into the city's casino (poetic justice or just right? you decide)

I ran into Dave and Colleen from Ottawa in the City Hall Museum. They were on the train from Adelaide to Alice Springs whenever ago and we had talked a lot and drank in Annie's Place around Uluru Time. Dave had lent me an interesting book by Alan Dershowitz about terrorism and I forgot to mention it.

They felt too poor to accompany me to the Carleton-Maine brewery for a tour. Oh well.

The Brewery's main product is XXXX Beer (pronounced "four eckses" like Dos Equis but in English and squared).

I'd never tried XXXX before because Dave, in Alice Springs, had told me it was watery shit and I should have Toohey's New instead. So I did. I now realize Toohey's New is as bad as anything and maybe the Queenslanders have put up with enough discrimination.

I've only been on two brewery tours before (I feel like it's three but I can't think what the extra one would be): Coors in Colorado and Sam Adams in Boston. The Carleton-Maine brewery was at once more fancy and more boring. And brewery tours aren't the height of excitement anyway, except maybe for the end.

There was a series of eerily Epcot-like presentations in dark rooms with seats that rotated, and figurines that were lit up for voiceovers, and then a series of hilariously pitiful commercials from the 1970s and 80s.

We walked more extensively around the actual production and bottling facilities than I have before, but they were mostly offline after some sort of Pasteurization Accident mere hours earlier. Louis would be furious!

The highlight of any brewery tour is the Free Beer that follows it. In this regard the Carleton-Maine brewery fails utterly. Yes there's beer at the end and it is good, but it's not free. Drinking adults pay $8 more admission than non-drinkers or children. That's a total of eighteen australian dollars more than admission to American breweries I've visited, where it's all free.

Free free free until they let your pre-lunch drunk ass out to shop for merchandise.

XXXX Beer is fine and unremarkable like its other Australian counterparts (VB and Carleton Draught I suppose). A "special treat" re-creation of the historical XXX (only three X's) sparkling ale was shilled to me like Ambrosia by the lone bartender. It sucks and is very caramel-y.

But the Carbine Stout, wow! It's no Guinness, as they say, but I'm growing tired with Guinness anyway and I hardly ever have it. The Carbine Stout tastes like charcoal. Maybe not like eating charcoal but the equivalent of smelling a nice charcoal fire. Verrry nice. Maybe Queenslanders aren't so dumb after all.

No, in fact it's the tourists. I've just discovered that among the group of British children sharing a dorm with me, one has an old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock that ticks every so often. (Every second? Who knows).

I can't deal with this, I already know, so the question is whether to hide the clock, destroy it, or get so drunk I won't notice it while I try to sleep.

I don't like any of these options. I mean the last one's ok but I have a flight to Tokyo at 9 tomorrow morning so let's be reasonable.

How did I catch a cold on the beach in June?

This is my last post from Australia.

Stamped June 10, 2004 08:02 PM in Australia