Brisbane - Cedar Glen farmstay

9th June 2014

Some random house near Curreh's house.

The houses in Brisbane are quite hipster. It's like they have no rules, no nothing. You are free to design your house according to you liking even if it looks hideous or strange.

A very cool cul-de-sac opposite Curreh's house.

This cafe (bistro at night) was open when I walked past it at 6am.

Maybe Australians aren't that lazy after all.

We walked along the river, to the Brisbane city. It was quite a walk, but the weather was so fine I didn't mind at all.

Brisbane river.

This fruit juice stall sold really really good fresh yoghurt with fruit puree.

We tried the passion fruit one and a large cup of berries juice.

Best thing ever.

Aussie version of Burger Kings.

Just a normal fast food joint to me. Their McDonald's serve very good beef burgers though. It's called the Grand Angus or something. It tasted like those overprices gourmet burgers here.

An out of place church in the middle of Brisbane city.

So after some roaming around the city, we took the ferry  back. It's called the CityCat (cute right?), and drove to Daisy Hill for a BBQ get-together with a few of my dad's friends who migrated to Queensland.

It was the Queen's birthday (but they don't have a queen so I have no idea what the deal was about), and apparently people in Queensland all go for BBQ's on public holidays lol.

Our venue was in a koala park, but we couldn't spot a single wild, free koala. Just a lot of kangaroos and wallabies. But they had this koala centre at a corner of the park with 2 super active koalas. I imagined them to be very lazy and slow creatures, but they were literally climbing everywhere.

My dad says that koalas look like Australians (wth?!), and I don't really know what he meant by that...

The park was basically surrounded by tons of trees, with picnic tables and BBQ pits, and a huge field at the centre of it all.

Our night was spent in a Malaysian restaurant run by my dad's friend's sister, and we had steamboat... with... Wagyu beef lol. And lamb.

It's tough job to not get fat there, since the food quality is so good and raw food there is considered quite cheap. I guess food in restaurants is expensive because they pay a lot for workmanship.

10 June 2014

Shopping day :)

Walked to the chemist (pharmacy) after breakfast and got a whole lot of... uhh... I don't know what my mom bought. I was just amazed at the variety of supplements they have. And the way they sell protein powders in buckets.

Then we went for groceries in Coles, and boy, I was in heaven.

Coles, is like Ben's Independent Grocers, with much affordable pricing and more variety.

I cannot begin to describe how fascinating it was shopping there.

The week after we came back, my parents and I head to Jusco to stock up on food, and we were like... not interested to stop and slowly glance through the products, because there was nothing to glance at.

Best example: Kit Kats.

They have milk chocolate, dark chocolate, mint, hazelnut, white chocolate, caramel, peanut butter...

We have original. Period.

And their bread section.

This was a bakery outside Coles.

And the bread section in Coles is like triple this. Imagine.

A fruit shop beside Coles. This is like two-thirds of the shop.

Imagine.

And the variety of cheese they have. And their yoghurt rack. And milk. And beef.

We bought a whole trolley full and the bill was only 120 dollars.

WTH??!!!

Even after conversion it was still cheaper.

Mind you, we bought 5 days worth of breakfast, 3 days worth of lunch and 4 dinners. And dessert. Lots of dessert.

How is this fair???!!

*bangs head on table*

After lunch we drove to the outskirts, Beaudesert, for our 3-day farm stay.

It took quite a while because the roads just kept getting narrower and my dad had no idea if he was even going the right direction. We just relied on a very rough description my mom found online. But the drive was amazing. The view throughout the entire journey was... wow...

(My brother and I saw a pair of cows mating in the middle of a field with tons of other cows and horses watching but this is not the point.)

This was our cottage for 2 nights. It was quite small and cozy, and it had a fantastic view. On the right, where my sister is standing in the picture, was a huge field with horses roaming free all day. 

Every morning, someone will ride up the hills in a truck to call them down for breakfast, and you'll see tons of horses galloping down the hills towards our cottage.

And also a lot, a lot of wallabies lol.

The other side was all hills and fields and trees.

We had breakfast out here on our last morning there.

We didn't do it before that mainly because it was too cold. Yeah the temperature there was slightly lower than Brisbane's. But a plus point there is that we could see thousands of glittering stars at night.

I realised I forgot to take a picture of the bedrooms with the camera.

They're all taken with  my phone. Don't ask why.

Oh yeah, and they welcomed us with a jug of super creamy fresh milk in the fridge and a jug full of homemade cookies on the kitchen counter.

(Best service ever.)

11 June 2014

We woke up, and went straight to feed the animals.

And to milk the cow.

Breakfast by yours truly.

And after that we went for horse riding.

The entire trail normally takes an hour but there were 5 of us and none of us knew how to ride horses so they took it really slow. We took 1.5 hours, around the farm, up hills, across creeks, across herds of cows and goats. It was quite  an experience.

At about 4pm, Nigel, the farm owner drove us up to the peak of the tallest hill there in a 4WD to watch the sunset. With complimentary champagne lol!

(orange juice for the kids)

The sunset was quite stunning but it happened so fast.

I need to learn how to capture sunrises and sunsets, without a tripod.

Can't seem to get the gradients.

Dinner: lazy ready-made pasta casserole from Coles, stir fried asparagus with A LOT of bacon, salmon and anchovies spreads on cucumbers and plain crackers.

Bliss.

12 June 2014

Last morning in Cedar Glen (oh yeah it's called Cedar Glen lol I forgot to mention), breakfast on the veranda. Scrambled eggs with Turkish bread, granola with fruits and yoghurt, coffee and tea. And milk.

I can't normally stand drinking milk on it's own here, except for Goodday and Farm House.

But I really didn't mind just drinking cups of milk for breakfast there. Okay fine maybe I do, but you get the point.

A random fire spot with fire woods beside our cottage.

That mountain behind.

We checked out and left for Gold Coast after breakfast.

This was the first and only signage we got. After like 16km of nothing-ness along a one-lane country road.