Tuesday, May 02, 2017

More Brisbane

Our first two days in Brisbane were spent in a Next Hotel; the Riverview.  It was fine but quite a distance from downtown.  It did have a garage so we could keep the car.  We had decided that after returning the car we'd move to a downtown hotel so that's just what we did.  We moved to the Ibis Styles Hotel which was quite different.  First, we were on the 24th floor!  Great views of part of the downtown and across the river.  I counted 14 building cranes; you might say things are growing!  The room was fairly compact but very clean and comfortable.  We liked it a lot.


As usual we wandered around.  There is a lovely park near the downtown area so we spent some time checking it out.  It was pretty cool to be in the trees but surrounded by city.  As a country mouse, all those new skyscrapers really get my attention.


On the Sunday we got tickets for the Lone Pine Koala Preserve.  You can drive to it of course but it's more fun to take the boat.  On the way to get the boat we saw a sign warning about the birds in the area!


 The trip takes about an hour and they have a timed narration running so you learn quite a bit about the city.  Brisbane has had quite a history with good guys and bad and quite a few floods.  (Incidentally Cyclone Debbie had eased on down the coast and was watering the area just south of Brisbane.  More than a couple people lost their lives in the flood this year.) 


The Preserve is supposed to be the oldest in Australia and, actually, it's become more of a zoo showing off all the animals unique to Australia.  Of course they have koalas and take wonderful care of them I'm sure but they have plenty of other characters.  The koala we are told eats about 4 hours a day and sleeps the other 20.  I believe it!  We saw one that was really awake while the rest were curled up sleeping.  They have a special permit to allow people to have their photo taken holding a koala - for $18.  They switch out the poor koala about every half an hour so it can go back to sleep.  No, we didn't go for it.


I'll only drag this out with photos of a couple more animals:  a small kangaroo who was in a part of the park set up as a petting zoo and a Tasmanian Devil.  I'd never seen a Devil before and I thought he was kind of an ugly little guy but maybe he'd grow on me.  The sign says they can eat 40% of their body weight in 30 minutes!  Currently they are dying off due to some cancer-like disease.  Hopefully a cure will be found soon.


So that was the remainder of our time in Brisbane.  The next morning we got a taxi for the airport.  Ordinarily we'd take public transportation but we'd discovered the station was quite a long walk from our hotel and would cost $36 for the two of us.  $50 for a cab sounded lots better!  We were off to Adelaide.

No comments: