We arrived from Cairns around 1:00 yesterday afternoon and got settled into our room in Brisbane around 3:00. Brisbane is a much larger city than Cairns, about 2.2 million vs 150,000 for Cairns. The city is a major business center and our hotel is right in the middle of the downtown office area. We have a hop-on-hop-off bus pass like we did in Sydney and we'll be using that to get around to the sights today. Tomorrow, we have an all-day 4WD adventure out into the wilds, and on Wednesday we have an open day to go see the sights.
Sorry, but no pictures yesterday, but we promise many today!
OK...we went to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary today and they had a remarkable collection of Australian wildlife. The Sanctuary itself is the world's oldest Koala sanctuary and has been operating since the 1920's, when a local man decided to try to do something to preserve the koala's, which were being hunted into extinction. The park was really nice and had almost continuous shows and discussions about the various animals. One of those place where you could spend an hour or a day.
Here's Pat with a new friend:
The first stop, of course, was the koala exhibit and the half-hour or so discussion about how the park staff cares for them. It was very interesting. Here are four subjects...see if you can find them all:
Pat made another new friend as we were leaving the Koala area. This guy looked just like a Teddy Bear:
Our next stop was a talk about Australia's native species of Raptors. The first was the smallest Raptor, the Kistrel, which feeds on small animals such as mice:
The next bird was the Barn Owl, native to Australia, but also found around the world:
The Barking Owl:
And Australia's second-largest Raptor, the Sea Eagle:
After leaving the Raptor show, we wandered through the Park and came across some other interesting inhabitants, including Tazmanian Devils:
Several Dingo's:
A Platypus:
And some colorful Parrots:
Tomorrow, we're off for a 4WD Excursion through the local jungle, so we should have plenty of good pictures!
Pat's Paragraph............. Quite a day today. I wish you all could have been there with us at the Sanctuary. They had something for Everyone. For the little kids they had a petting zoo with baby piglets, baby lambs, baby chicks and baby ducks, minature horses and guinea pigs. The raptor show was amazing from the tiny kestrel to the amazing sea eagle. They had a wedge-tailed eagle, which is their largest raptor, but he had been injured and was alone on an island in a large pond. You could see him from the shore but there was no way to get a picture of him. There is a small path to the island for feeding and they are also trying to tame him. The entire santuary was full of 'wild animals' just walking around. They could leave but why would they want to do that? There were lizards of all sizes and descriptions and if you weren't watching they'd walk right up under your feet hoping you'd drop some food or drop a 'bug'. There were 'bush turkeys' all around, they're about the same size as our wild turkeys, also keeping down the insect population. We saw one industrious guy digging in the flower garden and his hole was so deep you could only see his tail sticking out!
