A must see here at the east coast is of course Steve Irwin’s Australia zoo. And with mr. Scientist’s love for zoos and my wanting a picture with a koala, we had a clear mission today!

Like I said, mr. Scientist loves zoos, so usually whenever there is a zoo in town, we tend to go. And yes, it can be busy at times, but not like this. To put it in Dutch terms: when we arrived at the parking lot this turned out to be not an Artis experience, but one of Efteling proportions!

We thought we left early arriving only 14 minutes after their doors opened – but no. The first two or three parking lots were already full and we saw crowds of people shuffling towards the entrance. And I say shuffling on purpose, because the people here are really, really fat! We started to notice in Brisbane and I do not get why. Maybe it is a protest movement against the hot super dudes..? But, no worries mate. The good news is that the zoo is so big that all people just seemed to disappear as soon as we were through the doors.

On the other hand, they may have just sprawled out and settled at the many different restaurants and food stalls in the park, because when I went to the toilets at the food court, most tables were already taken by families having “breakfast”. I put this in brackets, because I don’t know about you, but I usually do not eat hot dogs or hamburgers for breakfast. I even heard someone say: “now, lets first have some hamburger with pizza!”.

First real stop for us was the crocodile sanctuary. I don’t think I have ever seen so many crocodiles and alligators. Usually a zoo has one kind, maybe two, but there are like eight different ones here. And not just one per kind. Oh no! We were looking through the fence and like: “hey, there is one. Hey, another one. And there. There, there…” I mean, I was happy not to be in the cage, because you would have to watch out not to trip over any of them. 

After that it was time to cuddle a koala! Mr. Scientist refused, so I took the honours of holding Australia’s cutie, upon myself.

After the picture was taken, we headed over to the wilderness show in the big arena. There were happy rangers cheering up the crowd, colourful birds flying over your head, dingos and snakes being taken through the audience, but the real star of the show was this cheeky egret. He was not an official part of the show, but clearly wants to get into showbizz, so cheerfully took centre stage. Of course it got really exciting when the crocodile swam in… While the rangers (very) quickly jumped away whenever the crocodile jumped out of the water, the egret looked fear into it’s eyes – literally in this case – and just continued to walk into the water (not jump out off, like the rangers) and calmly continued with dinner. 

Another highlight was feeding the kangaroos. Who knew those big kangaroos can be just as chill as their small cousins the quokka?! You can find a small park in the middle of the zoo, where both kangaroos and walibies are happily jumping or lying around and you can simply join them. 

Actually, you can even feed them. You can buy a small bag of roo food in any of the zoo stores for only 3 dollars. So of course, off I went! (For your information: the food looks like rabbit food.) Unfortunately, none of the roos wanted any of my food! I think I wasn’t the only one excited about the idea, so when I came along at 4pm, they had probably already eaten all day. This was of course unacceptable, so I continued to stalk the kangaroos until I finally found one that was probably overlooked all day. Imagine my excitement!

And like that wasn’t enough for one day, right near the exit a mommy koala started to walk around with her baby on top!