3-22 to 3-24 Brizzbane

So after a nice hour sleep from arriving into melbourne around 2330 and leaving at 430 to catch my flight at 710 to Brisbane I arrived safely into the East coast for another great adventure.
The AirTrain transportation from the airport to the city of Brisbane is very accessible once you head out of the airport and is only 30au round trip. Which I ended up taking because I'm beginning to love trains and these ones have free wifi on them, genius. I then arrived into Fortitude Valley where the hostel was and got there with unpacking and taking a quick 3 hour nap from the long night i just had. I arose, got some food, talked to the staff and then talked to this amazingly young just out of high school American from Seattle named Simon who is a super down to earth college NBA basketball sports lover with years ahead of his age.
After that it was starting to get late, like 9 haha, and I felt like sleeping again so i hoped on my creaky bunk for some rest.
Woke up ready to go, Simon told me about the city cycle bike transport, and I head off picking up a bike along the way. I rode around the city not knowing which street i was going down or where it was taking and it ended up where I wanted to go which was the queens street area near the victoria bridge to the South Bank Library and all of the really cool museums that I will come back to some other time in this life. Hung around checking stuff out and uploading data at the library because the wifi is amazing.
After that I came back and played a little ball with Simon in a game of 21. It was so hot I don't remember the score but my shirt was still drenched hours after which we ended up going to the naturally made climbing walls over on kangaroo point that at night have floodlights for great visibility.
We climbed around for a bit before heading back and grabbing some food with some of the roommates.
After dinner we sat around deciding what to do and headed off to a Casino downtown for some fun. Nothing much happened besides Simon accidentally dropping his wallet which someone turned in taking only the au currency and not the US dollars, kinda weird but hope for humanity.
Headed back, went to bed, got up and packed everything up for the adventure to continue up the coast to the Sunshine Coast.

Not much music this week or youtubes but something you should definitely check out is House of Cards.
First picture is from the day I left Hobart by the way and the one with the words was done by yours truly.
Cheers for now!

36hrs of cheap travels in Brisbane
by Julian Loyola
Accommodation, transportation, night life, food and wifiu.u.
Top 3 hostels
Valley Verandahs, 5 min walk to Fortitude Valley,- 18au a night shared room mixed 11 bed, very useful kitchen with fridges, hot showers/bathrooms cleaned daily, very mellow lounge area with a tv room, and washer 3au per spin and dryer 1au per spin or a hanging dry line. Very cool and mellow place to hang at with really nice beautiful staff who are very friendly. This is where I stayed.
Bunk Backpackers, heart of Fortitude Valley - heard amazing things about this place but if your into house music bumping till 4am then go right ahead. There lowest price is 19au in a 20 bed mixed dorm and something more private like a 4 bed mixed ensuite, including w/c, runs 31au a night.
Yellow Submarine, 5 min walk from the transit centre or 10 min walk to the heart of Brisbane, - if your into a mellow place that is friendly without too much noise at night then this another cool place to stay for around 25au a night in a shared dorm of up to 12ppl. Location wise it is a walk from the main bar scene in Fortitude Valley, but right next to all the museums and the public library in South bank.

Transportation
The biggest thing I love about this city is how small it is if you love walking around, but if you want some public transportation the system is very similar to that of Sydney or Melbourne. Similar to sydney as you can use your pass, all around bus, train, and boat, to easily navigate everywhere, but its made out of paper. Melbourne on the other hand is exactly the same as in card, plastic magnetic card that you can upload money on and navigate on trams, trains, and no boats considering there isn't much of a big harbor, but is called a Myki instead of Brisbane's Go Card which allows you to use all transit just like the Myki card but different color and the use of boats. Now how to use Myki or Go, first you have to purchase a card at a train station or most 7 eleven retailers will sell you one in both cities, melbs and Briz, and then top it up with money so you can travel around on the public transportation. I don't know the exact numbers but depending on where you go is how much its going to cost so for instance going from Fortitude Valley station to Beisbane Central station its 3.80au on Go and going from Flinders Street station to Caulfield station in Melbourne its around 3.80 as well. I didn't have enough time to use the citycat which is the super cool very nice cruising looking boat system in Brisbane that takes you along the Brisbane River.
Another alternative is taxi which is your frivolous on your spending then use it in desperate needs but if you love riding cruiser bikes then go to citycycles.com and rent a bike for 2au a day or 11au for a week. Citycycles is very similar to the system in Europe but you have to go online, pay, get a number, register a pin, and then your good to go because you walk up check a bike out, make sure it has a helmet, tires are pumped, etc., and then go to the touch screen for typing in your number to rent the bike out. But there's a trick in renting the bike out because the system is meant for going from one spot of the town, point A, to the next, point B, and docking your bike rather than taking the bike for the whole day. So when I say trick, you should only have the bike 25 minutes before docking it somewhere else near where you are, and if you don't know where a dock station is the website has a map of all the stations in the city. Save your wallet from screaming and get some exercise for your body's future by using the bike system, I did.

Top 3 happening bars if you want to have a good time all situated in Fortitude Valley
Alhambra lounge - playing tons of good house music with new DJ's every week
Cloud land - situated in what feels like a disco scene to amazon plant garden and very cool restaurant that has a retractable roof, this place is very fun and has a great ambiance for young energy.
Birdee Num Num - the perfect backpacker/student/young blood vibe with a very cool outdoor ambiance and bar that is very unique, a definite must see for a pickup.

Top 3 Restaurants that might allow you dance a little off your bill
Guzman y Gomez
Location: Fortitude Valley
Trading hours: Lunch & Dinner
If your into chipotle or Barbecoa then this is a spin off of their assembly food line concept but the Australian version. The prices range in what you want, burrito, taco, salad, burrito bowl, up to mostly 12au and is another great place to refuel with healthy options included.
Taro's Ramen & Cafe
Location: 363 Adelaide st. in the city central
Trading hours: Lunch & Dinner
If you love ramen like I do then you will love this place which is only 13.80au for a big bowl of delicious noodles, MSG not included btw.
Coles or Woolworths
Location: all over the city
Trading hours: 7am to 12pm 7 days a week
If your in the mood of making dinner and having control over what your wanting to eat then these supermarkets have great deals on packaged 4 green salad mixes that are 3au, bag of grapes for 2.90au, rotisserie chickens 8.50 to 10.50au, and all other goodies for low prices so you don't have to hurt your budget.

Wifi
There is tons of free wifi all throughout the city under the name citycouncil in parks or in city squares that you can find online googling free wifi Brisbane and it will pull up a map with all the wifi hotspots. If you want something with a little more power in uploading huge amounts of pictures and if you don't have a connection to begin with in finding the free wifi then feel free to ask someone where the state of Queensland library is.

3-22 Goodbye Melbourne and Welcome Brisbane

A big thanks to the Payne family, Emma-Lee, Robin Wilson, Abdelaziz Bennani, Alla Wolf-Tasker, and Tracy Shortle for letting me stay in your homes inside the Melbourne area and also those for allowing me to work in such a short time in the Victoria Daylesford hidden gem.
Goodbye for now and one day we will meet again!

Say hello to Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast to the Great Barrier Reef!

3-21 Tasmania Tour: Goodbye Tasmania

Well after an amazing morning and a not so cold night in the car I headed off to take the rental car back to its home before heading to the airport. It started to rain and i think it was perfect timing to leave considering it didn't rain once while i was here. So goodbye for now and thank you letting me have safe travels everywhere I went.

3-20 Tasmania Tour: A day in the Hobart Area

Woke up this morning and had a huge headache that kept me from thinking of getting out to see the south part of Tasmania down the Huon trail. So I persevered and when I got to Huonville my headache was gone, but funny enough I got tired of driving and went all the way down there to convince myself to turn around. I did get some amazing shots while i was down there and made it back to a stunningly blue sky. I really didn't want to do anything when I was driving back, but I then saw a sign for Mt. Wellington and decided what the hell I mine as well try to keep this mind busy. On my way up I realized that it's the biggest mountain in the area and that I've seen it before covered in clouds. The pinnacle has the best views of the city that overlook kilometers in the distance from Watergate to Port Arthur and Bruny Island to Kensington. It was pretty cool up there and has similar geological spitting rock from the ground as the formation of Cradle Mountain.
After that I wondered if there was a local Library I could pit stop at and miraculously found it driving down Murray street when I stopped at the light perpendicular to Bathurst. It has free parking for ten small spots if your lucky and wimpy 500mgb before they cut you off free wifi per day. Got bored after that knee kick and kept thinking about going to South Arm, very thin straight of land in between two beaches on the other side of the bridge heading away from Hobart and closer to Sorrel. I eventually made the decision short after the wifi took my days work of going through photos to post and when I got there I said: wow it looked so much more interestingly enjoyable from the top of Mt. Wellington. The beaches were nothing special and on the one side facing Antarctica there was tiny waves with a huge ok looking sand bar and on the other side was a dry long walk along sand to flat water that I wasn't really interested in investing more time either. So after expecting something spectacular and not knowing what to do I headed back and saw a fitness center on the outskirt of Hobart city when coming over the bridge from Bellarive. At this point I was in need for an endorphin fix after I'd been driving 1200km+ for 5 days straight, recovering from a nasty bug, taking over a 1,000 photos, and having a weird kinda wanting to do something day. Got in for an amazingly cheap gym price of 7.40au and ran 2km+ in 11min, biked 4km+ in 6min, lifted for 45min doing a routine mad and I used to do with adding in some stretching in between and a foam roll at the end. I then got into my nice comfortable blue nut hugger and swam 1300m in 25min to then seeing a steam room for maybe a little sweat therapy? After the steam I then did some hot sauna cold shower therapy to flush out any lactic acid. I know seems and sounds like a lot but you would be surprised how far you can push your body when you have a mental drive for taking care of it while the endorphins give your mind a little clearing.
My philosophy of taking care of your body is 65% diet and 35% exercise. The diet part consists of no dairy, red meat limited to once a month, 20 grams or more of white meat, lots of greens, if you have a juicer USE IT, 1-2 avocados, lots of fruit in the morning, 3-4 liters of water depending on how you feel, and a manuka honey scoop to help wash down 4 capsules filled with organic spirulina, chlorella, barleygrass, alfalfa with basic minerals/vitamins as well, and all of that daily. The other part is the 35% exercise of running, biking, lifting, swimming, and tons of stretching to get your muscles warmed up for abuse.
Start slowly by working your way into it like a gradual hill that keeps progressing upwards till your in a full swing of 100%. Also find what balances your lifestyle because everyone is different and feel free to tweak the idea to your own liking of a healthy diet/exercise with knowing your body's limits.

Enjoy the daily photos!

Cause the ceiling can't hold us, my love my love my love, but shit it was 99 cents - Macklemore and Ryan Lewis

3-19 Tasmania Tour: Cradle Mountain Summit to most of the center West ending back in Hobart

I slowly came alive after a toss and turn at one am, four am, and seven am from the negative Celsius degree that the mountains provided me. I remember turning on the car to heat up my legs more than once and when the sun was out it still was hard to warm up from the super cold. I drove up the road and entered the Cradle Mountain park to decide which trail I should take. The sky was a little cloudy and there was a misty overhang that wrapped around the mountain itself. I eventually pushed out of the car hoping to warm up by running up whatever trail went upward and wrote down dove circuit, which wraps around the lake at the base of the mountain, but I saw someone before me write: summit. So I decided what the hell its probably amazing up there and headed in the direction of that person. Heading out on the trail I took some pics and then started the incline jog that lead me to the amazing individual who wrote summit. We exchanged some words of hello that lead into a some very amazing conversation and we ended up on a trek to the very top. Every corner that presented itself kept getting better and better visually with more views of lakes, ponds, clouds, forestry, and streams flowing into the lakes.
When Rene, the person who wrote summit and a short description about him is an Austrian traveler who loves mountains/wilderness as much as I do, and I got to the summits bottom part it was a little misty overcasting the mountain. We had some doubts about being trapped up there without seeing in front of ourselves but when we kept moving farther up it started to get clearer with an occasional overcast cloud here and there. When we reached the top we took some panoramic pictures and said: wow this is amazing! The clouds cleared up for a minute and we both said: should we take this window to get back down without the rocks being slippery? Why not!
On the way down we saw a cute biologist girl from Berkeley who was super talkatively nice and was doing some data on skinks, lizards. By the time we got to the bottom of the summit trail the clouds had cleared and the Cradle presented itself to us for the first time. We then headed down the face trail which ended up in our separation due to me going a million miles an hour and Rene wanting to take it easy on the knees. Such a cool person to meet and I had such an amazing time talking with while we were enjoying ourselves. I then cruised along the trail and wanted to make it back to the car around one so I could see more of the west with the time I had. I cruised along the dove lake trail that i first put down on the log book passing old people, get out of the way geeze, and tourist groups that i despise wasting time over unless its family. Why waste your time with a group of twenty people who you don't know when you can go where you want and at your own pace?
Got to the car park and bolted out on my way to see more of the country along the A10.
Corner after corner lead into breathtaking scenery of amazing plaines, tree's, mountainzzz, lakes, a mining pit filled with green turquoise water, and a waterfall filled with dense moss forestry in between a water propelled electricity plant.
I took it all in and when I got to Hamilton the energy of dry plaines flowed over me with dancing dry grey tree's in vast open yellow hills. That area reminded me of Daylesford on steroids and I came to the conclusion of heading back to Hobart for another amazing knee bending crooked sleep in the Alto.

You'll find me on the top of a rock that sits very close to the very top of a mountain that overlooks more than several lakes next to ridged mountains and beautiful dense forestry. I'm not sharing this solo experience alone and the person I'm with is as calm as I am. We both stare into the vast depths of incredible scenery and share this moment for it may never happen again.

Enjoy the pics there's hundreds!

Another day of barely any music including Blackmill's soundtrack Miracle and the occasional radio catching a signal playing Macklemore and Ryan - this is the moment.