Tuesday 29th July 2014

After a tough flight of no sleep and horrible kids we arrived in Brisbane pretty tired. We waited around for about an hour as we were meeting Dave who has just arrived back from Bali! We had a coffee and enjoyed hearing his stories from his travels!

We said goodbye to Dave and headed over to get our rental car and we went for a drive to the Gold Coast and through the countryside, which was great fun to drive! We got a good view over towards Gold Coast and to Brisbane. We stopped off at Gold Coast for some lunch which we picked up along the way. It was a really good drive but after a couple of hours we were pretty tired and headed back to Brisbane.

We checked into our hostel which was not to far from the city and we headed out to the supermarket to grab some dinner and breakfast for tomorrow.

We had a nice walk along the river and through south bank and back to the hostel. Brisbane looks like a really great city, its just a pity we have a short amount of time and we can't properly explore. South bank looked amazing! They had a little lagoon that seemed to go on forever and plenty of bars and restaurants along the river, unlike the south bank in Melbourne!

We were pretty tired so we headed back to the hostel to get some sleep as we were both struggling!!

Wednesday 30th July 2014

We had a little lie in, 7 am, before we got up and out of the hostel and on the road up north towards Australia zoo!!

We finally arrived after an hours drive and headed inside, we went to the information centre first as we had our booking for our animal encounter with the koalas! We had about an hour with the koala. We can only hold a Queenslands koala as they are smaller than the Victorian koalas, each state has their own laws! Victorian koalas have a high temperament so that is also another reason why. They smell funny and he was really heavy and he was only a young one! Unfortunately they cannot release these koalas into the wild due to the fact they have had way to much human contact and that their food source is getting smaller so they would do worse out in the wild than inside the zoo. Its a shame really as they are so cute! We picked up our free magnet which we choose our own pictures from the huge selection the photographer had taken!

It was great to actually do finally do this as I have been waiting to do this for years! After our experience I kept smelling koala! It was really off putting!

We went to see the crocodile show which was really great and funny, and we had a great time watching it! There was also a great bird show as well.

We continued our walk around the park where Steve Irwin is hugely celebrated and remembered for all of his work. They had a great display about crocodiles and how to protect them and protect humans. They tried relocating crocs hundreds of miles away but they some how managed to find their way back. The also caught one croc that was being dangerous and getting to close to fishing boats. So Steve and his team caught the croc and put him in a cage and drove around the billabong with noisy boats and it scared the croc so much that he has never been near a human again. It was all very fascinating!

They also had a huge display of snakes which Stu enjoyed! They had a snake from Tasmania which is the only snake in the display house that needed to have air con as they are used to cold weather not the hot humidity of Queensland!

After we had seen everything we had wanted to see we headed back to Brisbane, we went into the city to met up with Vinny and Livy as they were in Brisbane too! We headed to the pub round the corner and had a few beers and some food before we headed back to the hostel to pack our bags, move the car onto the road as they shut the gates up after 11 pm ready for our flight at 7 am.