Holiday Blog - A day at a Brisbane wildlife park,,,,

After the wonderful Fruit bats and a good breakfast outside on the balcony of the hotel room, 10 floors up , enjoying the morning sun …and saying good morning to the window cleaner who appeared from nowhere. “what the bloody hell ! Oh, yes …good morning to you too”………………… We had to decide what we wanted to do for the day before going back to the airport and take an internal flight to Mackay township along the coast about half way between Brisbane and Cairns.

We’d seen enough of the gold coast. Our initial decision was to head north again (now we had change for any sudden motorway toll charges ( :O/ Sheesh ) and visit the Moreton Bay area (where the tasty bugs come from ) And that’s where we headed for. We confidently joined the motorway and dodged the traffic. Partly not being used to long drives anymore and partly due to not sleeping enough at night these days we had to pull off at a service station point. Jill would drive for a while. We also tried to get a decent map of the area….They don’t exist……

Meanwhile, over coffee and an impulse buy of a long doughnut, a new destination was agreed. Moreton Bay was dropped in favour of a Koala Sanctuary the other side of Brisbane.

We would stay on the motorway to it’s end and then into Brisbane cutting through a bit of suburbia to the sanctuary… Sounded easy enough . And indeed up to the motorway end it was. Then we hit trouble as road names changed or roads abruptly disappeared to be replaced by new names. Within a short time we were confused and pretty much lost…. We pulled into a service station and Jill got directions..>We were only a little off and within 20 Minutes were in the car park of the sanctuary.,

The sanctuary is in a nice place beside the river there. Effectively the place is a small ‘Open” zoo. They specialize in the Koala, but also had kangaroos, emus, wombats, and some reptiles. They also had the Infamous Cassowary bird….

The park is SPCA and Vet association approved and in the main the place was very well looked after . However we were very disappointed to witness the release of 20 or so teenager school kids into the park area reserved for the Kangaroos and emus… This caused some panic with the Kangaroos (you could walk amongst them . But – there were a number of “Joey” carrying Mothers. Jill and I were very close to sorting out a young Asian thug who tried to ride the Emu…He was an inch away from the pair of us taking him down ………..

The Park and the Koalas in particular was a great place to while away a few hours.

Having done our stint at the park, finishing off watching the wild lorikeets feeding session (hundreds of Lorikeets about us) and the display of various birds of prey flying around us and across parkland…It was time to hit the road again and head for the airport…. This turned out to be NOT for the faint Hearted. The heavy traffic, amazingly aggressive drivers, poor road signs and completely unknown roads made for a stressful hour and a half as we battled across town. Jill had a good Idea of where we were heading but the road system seem to work against us for some time…. However we made it in plenty of time, dropped off the sporty convertible rental car (I’d quite got to enjoy the car “O) and went through the airport security to the lounge. Destination MacKay.