Crikey Mate!! Australia Zoo!!

A week ago we realised that our Greyhound tickets grant us free admission to Australia Zoo, home of the Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin - how could we not visit the home of Australia's son? So on our way to Noosa Heads we jumped off the Greyhound around 9am ready for a 7-hour tour of Australian Fauna. The first hurdle was stowing all of our stuff in the zoo lockers. Ordinarily this would be a case of dropping some extra cash and getting three lockers but since we'd gotten in for free we weren't quite ready to part with $15 each. It took 20 minutes of rotating and squeezing (with added profanities) to fit our luggage into one locker. Baggage free we wandered into the zoo and the first thing we came across was a large bronze memorial of Steve Irwin. We made our way through the reptile section first, where we each had an opportunity to handle a baby American alligator – something David didn't relish the idea of but did anyway - fair'd income to him as they say here. I still don’t know what that phrase means but I say it anyway, David says G'day to everyone he meets and that seems to go down pretty well, when in Rome.

After the reptiles we got to see a pair of tortoises that grow to be the largest in the world, two brothers that due to their bad eyesight occasionally mount each other, a disastrous situation as often one will roll over onto its back and if left alone will literally boil inside its carapace. Unfortunately the world's oldest tortoise kept in captivity, Harriet the giant Galapagos, died on the 26^th June 2006. It hatched in 1830 on one of the Galapagos Islands and was taken over to England by Charles Darwin in 1834 where it spent many cold years before moving to Australia in 1842. Not a bad innings at 172. We skipped the Asian Elephant pageant to make sure we had good seats at the Crocoseum where we got to see a lot of strange birds fly in from across the zoo as well as some obligatory crocodile feeding antics.

The peak of the zoo experience had to be the koalas. I wasted most of my digital camera memory filming koalas on the off chance that one might wake up and move. Over the day I managed to capture a few seconds of koala action - a koala munching on a Eucalyptus leaf. I couldn't help but feel a little sorry for one koala hanging lazily in a forked tree branch as a procession of people took turns to stroke it. I can only hope that the koalas are on rotation otherwise it will soon have a hand-shaped bald patch. koalas may be the cutest animals on Earth but a close second has to be the wombat as they are like living teddy bears. I captured plenty of footage of a wombat picnic as well as a wombat having its stomach scratched by a zoo handler. Unfortunately for you guys back home I only had a day bag with me and lacked the space to steal either a wombat or a koala to bring back to the UK.

On our way to 'kangaroo heaven' we past through the 'Crocodile Hunter Story', a few corridors packed with photos, drawings and poems dedicated to Steve Irwin and his family, as well as a tribute including several hundred khaki zoo shirts covered with thousands of messages from fans all of the world pegged across both sides of a long fence. If you ever visit Queensland make sure you visit the Australia Zoo, easily the best zoo we've visited.

Below - Some might think David was a little excited about visiting the zoo.

Above - Battle of the cutest animals, Koala or Wombat? It's just too close to call...

Tuesday 7^th – Thursday 9^th October, Noosa Heads, 1100km north of Sydney.

After 7-hours at Australia Zoo we caught a courtesy bus to Noosa Heads. Ninety-minutes and two episodes of Croc Files later we stepped off the bus at Noosa. The hostel consisted of two quaint 19^th century wooden buildings encircled with wide verandas that the rooms opened onto. We spent most of Tuesday on a 6km trek around the heavily wooded peninsula. As we moved round the coast the views of the bay opened up revealing more and more of the stunning landscape. Being in Noosa Heads is like taking a holiday from a holiday and it's no exaggeration to say that the beaches here make Bondi Beach look like Weston-super-Mare.

On our way round the coast we came across a metre-long monitor lizard, the kind we'd seen in the zoo the day before. Since this one wasn't shielded behind a glass wall I decided to go off the beaten track and follow it through the dense undergrowth, staying close behind as it crunched through the dead leaf litter and ducked under exposed roots. After satisfying a small childhood fantasy to be a wildlife film maker we moved on. After walking for a few minutes we came across a guy limping past with a slightly bloodied bandage wrapped around his foot; apparently he'd been bitten by a python! We looked down at our open-toed sandals and decided that it might be better to stick to the track from there on. So we followed the track to a cliff called Hell's Gate, on the way we stopped to climb down to a secluded beach to go for a swim in warm clear emerald-coloured water. At Alexandria Bay we plodded the soft wet sand enjoying the cool sea water that lapped at our feet until a group of backpackers warned us of a snake lying somewhere in the sand a few hundred metres ahead. We past an emergency telephone on the beach and scanned the sand, scrutinising every stick and sand pit we came across. The southern end of the beach was populated by nudists standing up to maximise their exposure to the sun. Trying not to stare at them as we examined the sand we narrowly missed stepping on the snake, which slipped off up a sand dune and vanished into the trees. Half an hour later we made it to the southern side of the peninsula and took in a fantastic view of the Sunshine Coast.

Thursday 9^th October, We're on the Night Bus!

We enjoyed a long sleep-in this morning to ready ourselves for climbing back aboard the Greyhound. We're riding the Night Bus later, ready to crash and burn from 4pm this afternoon until 9am tomorrow morning, rocking up the Sunshine Coast to the Whitsunday Islands some 2136km north of Sydney.