Hi guys,

I'm going to try and keep this one short after last time!We managed to get down to Brisbane in record time and were at the koala sanctuary, just south of the city by noon. Yes it was open and yes (to our delight) there were koalas! 130 of them to be precise…we got mega snap happy with the first 5 or 6 we saw until we realised that they were literally everywhere with pens ranging from 'kindergarten' koalas to 'bachelor' koalas to 'retired' koalas!

We also got a quick stroke in with a couple of kangaroos as well as a wombat picture (finally) - the wombats always seem to be asleep everywhere we go so it was quite nice to see one awake, even if it did elude Martin when he got his camera out.We also finally saw a cassowary…it was defiantly big enough to take out a car so glad we didn't meet one on the road!Koala hugging was lovely..ours was a male hence the white spots on his back - apparently the more white spots they have the more 'masculine' they are??!! (and yes mum they do feel like a bag of sand!).

After all the koalas had had their photo taken we drove down to a campsite south of Brisbane and spent the afternoon chilling out by the (very luxurious) pool.

We said goodbye to Sharron in the morning and checked into our hostel before wandering round Brisbane to see the sights.It turns out that there aren't a great deal of sights although the shopping areas and parks are quite nice.You can tell that there is still quite a lot of damage to recover from the floods with most of the river-front bars/restaurants/lagoons closed while they put the city back together.

Last night we had a few beers in the hostel and had a remarkably good and cheap Chinese followed by more beer…unfortunately Brisbane has the same problem as Sydney in that we can't actually afford to go out a great deal, but what we saw for our brief Friday night on the town looked good!

Off to Christchurch today! Only the third city hit by disaster on route - trying to keep it at 3!!! Will update in a few days on New Zealand - might be quite a rush for the first few days but we'll keep the blogs coming.

Love Katie and Martin

(koala count: 130 (hugged 1); Cassowaries: 1; Emu:4; Kangaroo: too many to count)