The River City from the water

Above:  People pay to walk on the Story Bridge; I captured them from the ferry below.

The plan for the day was to explore the River City using the free ferry service called City Hopper.  But I now realise that the route is largely what I had done on foot yesterday.  It made sense for me to see more of city using the non-free public transport ferry that does a much longer route.

I headed out to North Quay, my nearest ferry boarding point about 0930.  After a bit of wandering around, I hopped on the first ferry about 1000.  This one was headed downstream with its final stop at Northshore Hamilton.

The one-hour trip took me through skyscrapers, high-rise apartments, low-rise residential of new and old homes and finally some industrial and green areas.  For operational reasons, we had to change ferry at Hawthorne.  The trip was slow because of the stops for which the ferry needs to manouvre and moor.

At the turnaround, I asked the crew if I had to hop off and reboard, or at least tap my card off and on to pay a new fare.  They insisted that I didn’t need to do that.  After a five-minute rest, we departed in the opposite direction.

It was another hour back to my starting point and from there, the ferry continued upstream to the other end of its route, University of Queensland at St Lucia.  Travel in this direction was shorter at 30 mins each way and there was less high-rise development.

In all, I spent a total of about 3h on the ferry.  At the University turnaround, the crew again insisted I didn’t need to tap my card to pay a new fare.  So, I did the entire 3h ride for one fare of about AUD3!  I was afraid that there might be some logic that would penalise me for embarking and disembarking at the same point, or disembarking after a maximum permitted timeframe.  I recall in Singapore, there’s a time limit placed on journey time to stop people having joyrides in the MRT enjoying the free air-conditioning.

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I was famished by the time I hopped off the ferry around 1300.  Near my hostel, I had seen a dumpling shop.  It was the perfect time for me to check them out.  I was pleasantly surprised at how thin the skin was compared to the hearty heavy ones that northern Chinese typically make.

The afternoon was spent in the hostel attending to admin for matters at home, on the computer.  I grabbed dinner at the pub under the hostel.  It was handy and reasonably price.  It was my second dinner faux pas in two days.  Tonight I forgot to present my hostel keycard for a 20% discount.  Damn!

Today was the first day I felt 100% since I got here.  After three nights of long sleeps of about 10h, I had overdosed on ZZZZZZs.  I had was wide awake and full of energy till after midnight.