Weekend adventures 1

8.2.10

Well,

This past weekend was a very exciting one. I was able to make my way out to Beerwah to Steve Irwin’s Australia Zoo with Kirsten (from DU). To get there, it was a 20 minutes bus ride and just over an hour train ride. Once we got to Beerwah, we had a 5 minutes complimentary ride to the zoo where we were told to meet at the bus stop at 2pm, 3pm, or 5pm. At the zoo, there was statues of the Irwin’s, birds of prey, reptiles (including turtles and giant tortoises) , wombats, kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, elephants, tigers, red pandas, alligators and of course crocodiles. This is also the location of the Animal Planet Crocoseum. This is where they have the “Wildlife Warriors” show. We went to see it and they had elephants, birds, snakes, and crocs in the show. It was a little disappointing. They also had a place to get food for feeding kangaroos and a place to hold a koala. Since we had already done that at the koala sanctuary, we skipped it. The zoo also had a free shuttle that went around the park because it’s fairly large. At this point we went to lunch and had “America Burger’s.” In Australia, a burger is basically meatloaf on a bun. They also had a wildlife hospital “sneak peek.” Inside they had an operating table and recovery areas. At the point we headed back to the bus stop at 3 so we could get picked up for our train at 3:09. This is when the ‘fun’ began. We found out that the bus driver lied to us and gave us the weekday schedule for busses and not the Saturday schedule. The Saturday schedule was 2:40 or 4:30. The next train was at 6:30 so they were dropping us off at the station 2 hours before the train. We were not about to wait around for 3 and a half hours because the stupid bus driver misinformed us. Luckily, there was a bus that ran straight from the zoo all the way back to Brisbane at 4. So we caught that, had to pay a little extra but had an in-transport movie and got dropped off at a bus station. We managed to get back to campus by 6:15.

Then Sunday came and it was time to recover from a very long day at the zoo. So I slept in and got a late breakfast where I met up with John, one of the Americans on study abroad as well. We decided that we were going to try to do something that afternoon/night. The final decision was go to Mt. Coot-tha. This is one of the places where you can see the entire city. We spent an hour taking photos, and walking around the little shops/restaurants, and on one of the hiking paths. Since it was starting to get dark, we didn’t go far on the path. Unfortunately, the public transportation doesn’t run late enough for us to have gotten night pictures of the city. I am kind of upset about that since I love seeing cities at night. Hopefully, I will get back up there with someone who has a car so I can stay after sunset and take pictures.

Now it is time to get back to work at school for week number 2.