Brisbane: Lone Pine Koala Santuary - 8.09

For some odd reason I have woken up every morning close to 7 and I'm wide awake. This morning was no different. As we are meeting up with Ave at 9:30 I had way too much time to kill :) So I decided to have a long and good lunch at the center of the town - 1h breakfast plus people watching :) Nice to look at all those people rushing around all around, running to offices :-P and I get to just sit there and not think about work :D Finally walked over to the south bay area, met up with Ave and we headed to the boat that took us over to Lone Pine Koala Santuary.

It took about 1h by boat to get to the santuary. Boat ride was very nice. Along the way we were given way too much information about the river and every single house on it ;) Some facts that I remember:
- it is 19km from the city to the santuary that we will travel
- boat is called MV Mirimar and is the oldest boat of it's kind that is still in service
- Mirimar was built for this purpose and has been servicing on taking people to Lone Pine Koala Santuary for decades, there used to be no other way of getting there due to poor infrastructure
- now this is rather interesting one: river of Brisbane changes direction 4 times a day due to tides :)

Once at the santuary we had a bit more than 2 hours to look around. Santuary itself was not very big, but it had all the animals we wanted to see - the native ones. We got to see possums, LOTS of koalas, we got to hold a koala :), we got to pet a kangaroo (or perhaps it was wallaby, no idea :) ), we got to see a wombat, I got to see all kinds of venomous snakes, there were lizards and whole bunch of different kind of birds. All in all it was wonderful. I learned quite a bit about koalas while there. For an example that there is only one kind of koala breed in Australia, they are just different color depending on the region. In Australia one can find 800 different types of Eucalyptus trees, but koalas feed off of only 50 types.

Our way back was again by the boat. Once back we attempted a bit of shopping again, but somehow we never got on the mood for that. Gathered my computer and other things from the hostel and headed over to David's house for a dinner with his parents and Ave. It was a very nice evening, they are great people and it is so nice to talk to locals - to ask questions and get their perspective on the culture, this is my favourite part when traveling.

Today was a very good day!