At the Brisbane Writer's Festival yesterday I had a free morning and afternoon so on the advice of Trip Advisor I decided to hike to the top of Mt Coot-tha from my hotel in the South Bank. Google Maps estimated that this was a 2 hour walk and the ever optimistic Apple Maps said it was a 1.5 hour walk. In fact there and back took me six hours but I do have a bad knee so I'm not blaming the map aps. The view at the top of the mountain was worth it. Looking east you can see all the way to the Pacific Ocean and twenty K back into the bush looking west. You climb up through suburbs and then mostly through rather lush and pretty Eucalyptus forest. I didn't see any animals but I did see several sulphur crested cockatoos which admittedly didn't wow me that much because they are exactly the same cockatoos which live in my backyard in St Kilda and begin screeching at 6-00am every morning. ...
After the hike I went to my last event at the writer's festival a rather fun "reading" at the Ipswich Library. (I always say reading in quotes because I never end up actually reading anything as I blabber on for so long...but to be honest no one ever seems to mind that much.) ...
At the festival I did do a lot of talking to other writers and a lot of thinking about my own writing in particular and crime fiction in general and I'll blog all about that later in the week. (Its more interesting than it sounds - trust me.)
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In the meantime here's a little bit about Mt Coot-tha from Wikipedia and some photographs I took on my ipod of the eucalypt forest and the view from the top of the mountain looking east towards the sea.
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Mount Coot-tha, which is 287 metres above sea level, has the highest peak in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Mount Coot-tha forms the eastern extent of the Taylor Range and is a prominent landmark approximately 6 km to the west of the Brisbane central business district. Visible from much of the city, Mount Coot-tha is a popular bushland tourist destination. Before the Moreton Bay penal settlement, Mount Coot-tha was the home of the Turrbal Aboriginal people. Early Brisbane people called it One Tree Hill when bush at the top of the hill was cleared except for one large eucalypt tree. The Aboriginal people of the area used to come to the area to collect ‘ku-ta’ (honey) that was produced by the native stingless bee. Mount Coot-tha (Place of Honey), a derivative of (the indigenous term), replaced the former title ‘One Tree Hill' in 1880 when the area was declared a Public Recreation Reserve.