Leaving Brisbane we headed to Noosa, a cool little surf town further up the East Coast, and also a good place to travel to Steve Irwin's Australia Zoo. Crikey!

Things started badly when our hostel lost our reservation so had no double room, but luckily we were given a seven bed dormitory just for us for two nights and for free. On top of which we even got a free dinner and drink. Think she felt bad about putting us in a dorm after I gave her the whole sexual assault story. Still, the dorm looked pretty infested (they have a massive problem with bed bugs over here being carried from place to place by dirty travellers, though as always with biting insects Rich was unscathed and Allison ends up as dinner. Guess bugs have good taste!), and Rich got a carpet burn injury from killing another cockroach.

The next mishap was that Noosa was actually a couple of hours away from Australia Zoo (crikey!), and we hadn't booked the courtesy bus in time so it was full. Instead we had to wake about 5am to make the journey on public transport (which adds about an hour to the already long journey), but luckily it was all straightforward and we made it before opening time.

Arriving at the zoo we were greeted by loads of excitable Aussies, all from the Steve Irwin school of over-excitement, but they got the crowd all fired up.

The zoo started about 30 years ago by Steve Irwin's dad as a reptile zoo, but with Steve's fame and TV work has grown from just a few employees to a couple of hundred, and has expanded to include elephants and big cats amonst others.

Much of the money Steve made was plunged back into the zoo to buy land and expand, so of an evening tigers and elephants have room to run around out the back. There's also a huge crocoseum at the zoo, which is where they put on daily shows with birds, snakes and crocodiles.

It was quite sad to visit the zoo so soon after Steve's death, as the staff there all obviously knew him and told stories about him as if he was still around, but the popularity of the zoo is a testament to the good work he did.

The zoo itself is great, the main focus being the crocodiles (they have loads of huge crocs), the interaction with the animals and the shows. From the minute you walk in staff are walking around with animals that you can touch, such as wombats, snakes and tiny crocodiles, during the koala shows you can stroke the koalas, there are elephant feedings (yeah we probably were the only people over fifteen years old feeding the elephants), the crocodile shows where the crocs jump out of the water to grab dangling meat, and the tiger show was amazing too, as eight-foot tall tigers climb trees and do some tricks.

The animals all seem really well treated, as some roam free around the zoo (lizards mostly), they have large enclosures to live in once the day is over, and Steve Irwin always insisted if the food wasn't good enough for him it wasn't good enough for his animals. There are kangaroo enclosures where you can stroll amongst them and stroke them too, and an emu that chases you along the fence too. Very funny.

There was also a tortoise feeding (these things were over a metre long and about the same high), though unfortunately the oldest tortoise in the world had died a couple of years ago aged over 170. Charles Darwin actually brought her over to Australia.

A great zoo and although they were missing a few of the normal zoo animals (maybe as they are still expanding from a reptile zoo), the interaction was great and better than any other zoo we have seen, and the animals look like they are treated so well, unlike many where they have small cages and go mad.

Next stop Hervey Bay, where we take a three day trip to Fraser Island.