We got up the next day and headed out of Noosa Heads toward The Australia Zoo. This is the zoo made famous by the Crocodile Hunter. “B” and I went here 17 years ago when we were in Australia for my friend’s wedding (“A and K”), and we thought the girls would enjoy it. IT was a good day at a zoo. We paid for a koala encounter. You get to hold a koala, well one person in the group gets to do the holding, and then get a picture taken. We planned to have “A” hold the koala. When it was time they told her, “It weighs about 7kg, is that ok?” “A” had no idea how heavy 7kg was so was like, “sure”. She told us later that it was a lot heavier than she was expecting. Well, the koala holding didn’t go as planned. Once in “A”’s hand it reached out for her glasses (green rimmed) with its claws and “A” was unsure about that, and then it pooped in her hand. That was all in about 10s. That was enough for “A” and so they transferred the Koala to “B” instead. The picture came out pretty good I think. WE saw lots of animals: Wombat!, kangaroos, wallabies, a baby koala (joey), elephants, and lots of birds. And of course we went to the big show that had birds and crocodiles. It was a fine show, but the crocodile didn’t want to play along too much so it wasn’t dramatic like it could have been. After that we headed to our place in Brisbane. On our way we stopped at a Thai place that was tasty, and while waiting for our order we looked at the pizza place next door, and they had funky pizzas (it called them that), and we decided to have that the next night for dinner. The place we stayed at was the lower level of a 2-story place. The owners use the top. It was nice, and they came out to greet us. This place was setup well for families with kids and had toys and stuffed animals. “G” really took to it.
The next day took us to more animals. When we planned this trip months ago, “B” was trying to find a way for “G” to interact with penguins in a way similar to the otter café we did in Japan for “A”. She found a penguin encounter at Seaworld in Australia, so we planned for a day at Seaworld. The thing is, “B” thought it was in Sydney so we had planned a day there for it, but only a couple days before we left on the trip “B” was looking and realized that Seaworld (which she had already bought tickets for) was outside of Brisbane not Sydney. Thankfully we didn’t have anything big planned for the second day in Brisbane so that became the Seaworld day. We drove down there and did the penguin encounter almost right away. It was just the 4 of us and the got us dressed in full cold weather clothing so we could go out on the ice with the penguin they had there. Then they took us out on the ice for a bit over 20 minutes (they said it had to be less than 20 minutes due to the temperatures, but it was longer than 20 minutes). During that time we got to feed them, pet them, learn about them, and generally interact with them. We blew bubbles and played with toys with them as well. It was a lot of fun. “G” had a great time. After that we saw polar bears, sea lions, seals, dolphins, and a stunt show. It was a fun day. After we left we ordered pizza from the place we had seen the night before. We got a reef and beef & a Moroccan lamb. They were both very good pizzas. Overall, this was a really great day. One of the better days in my opinion.
Here are a couple more animal pictures from Seaworld.
