The Jo Guest Posse – Brisbane

Arriving in Brisbane was a bit of a culture shock as we actually arrived at Roma St bus depot to find it much busier than expected.  We were used to finding a bus station that has a few vehicles passing through rather than a lively transport hub that has hundreds of vehicles passing through on a daily basis.

We had been told that if we looked in the phone book we would easily find somewhere to stay and sure enough, we looked in the phone book and there it was.  Some bright spark had actually named their hostel “Somewhere to stay”.

As they offered a free transfer to the hostel we gave them a call and arranged to be collected.  We took our backpacks and stood outside the main building and waited, and waited and then waited a little more.  Just as we were about to go and give them another call a girl came over to us, we assumed she was from the hostel but she had just seen the Canadian Flag on Barb’s backpack and wanted to chat to a fellow Canadian.

We stood and chatted to Sue for a while and kept a look out for the minibus but it still showed no sign of turning up, Sue asked us where we were headed and we explained what was happening, next thing we knew we were following her down the road as we had been invited to stay at her place for a little while.  She lived in Paddington; this was about 10 – 15 minute walk from the city centre so it was a struggle with our backpacks on in the Queensland heat.

The first night she took us to “The Underground”, this was the main nightclub for the area.  It wasn’t really my scene but we did have a good night out.  We never made it back to this club though.

I am pretty sure we outstayed our welcome at Sue’s house so we found ourselves a backpackers hostel based just a short walk from Paddington, it was just above the Paddo Tavern, a place called Bonkers Backpackers.  It is human nature to put down roots and we didn’t know it at the time but we would use this hostel as our base for quite a while. I have no idea why it turned out to be Brisbane that we settled in, it may have been because we had got fed up with travelling or the fact that we were in a city or any number of other reasons but we were in Brisbane and here we stayed.

It turns out that the backpacker scene is quite big in Brisbane and whole nights are dedicated to the backpackers.  The main night is the Beer Bash at the Story Bridge Hotel but there are plenty of other nights in and around Brisbane. We were big fans of the Beer Bash and didn’t miss too many of them while we were there.  There were lots of different party games going on but the main one was the Beer Bash itself.

The Beer Bash was a drinking race, two teams of 4 go against each other with the winner going through to the next round.  As there were 4 of us we had a ready made team with Barb as our secret weapon.  We made it to the final so many times but we only actually won it once, for this we won a huge golden cup.  Well, a cup printed on gold coloured cardboard.  We didn’t care, we had won and it was ours.  For quite a while it was displayed in the recreation room of the hostel in pride of place.

One of the reasons for staying in Brisbane was that we needed money so obviously needed to work. We were quite willing to try our hands at anything, I went to see about a charity collection role one day but the idea of standing in the street dressed in a huge fluffy Koala or Kangaroo outfit swinging a bucket in 40 degree heat didn’t really inspire me.

I did have one day of work with a builder, one of his customers was an Italian lady who owned a house in the Brisbane suburbs and was due to go to visit the house.  Our job was to clean the outside of the house.  It turns out that the lady was terrified of spiders so I fully understood the task when we pulled up outside the house. The building had several spider webs all over the outside so, armed with a high pressure water hose, my job was to make sure this old wooden building was “Spider free”.  A couple of hours and a lot of water later and you would never have recognised the place. 

This sort of casual working was all good fun but something more reliable was needed so Ian and I took a day to look for work, we tried quite a few places and ended up at the CD Fair that was in town.  We went in and the first thing we saw was Shirley, the Canadian girl that we met on the boat in the Whitsunday Islands, she was working there.  We had a quick chat and told her what we were doing and she found the boss.  He was a Huge Russian guy named Vladimir.  His voice boomed when he talked nut he was a decent guy.  He chatted with us and told us we needed to come back a few days later and he may have something for us. He told us to have a look around for a bit if we wanted so we browsed the CD’s.  A few minutes later Vladimir called us over and asked if we could start right then, a lorry had arrived with several pallets of new merchandise on it so we agreed and started to unload the lorry and broke down the pallets ready for the new CD’s to be put in their rightful places.  We had a job.  It was actually quite enjoyable as there was always music playing and the staff were mainly backpackers as well.  There was Shirley, a couple of Dutch Girls named Mandy and Susanna and later we were joined by another Canadian couple.  On some days it was fairly easy but on the run up to Christmas it got a little crazy, we were rammed and they employed an armed guard for the door security.  The work was also quite varied; we were restocking, patrolling to make sure nothing was stolen or working on the tills.  We did manage to stop quite a few thefts while we were there but it was mainly kids with backpacks.  I don’t know how they expected to get out with them as all bags were searched on the way out.

We worked at this fair until it moved on in early January and towards the end of the run Kev and Barb joined us and stayed to help break everything down and reload the lorries. Ian and I actually went to Canberra to set up and work at another fair afterwards but that is another story.