We arrived to Brisbane at about 2 o clock and checked in to our hostel which was called Sunshine House Backpackers. We then took a wander into the city centre to find an apple store so that Becki could replace her broken phone. After that was done we spent the late afternoon/ early evening wandering along the south bank, looking at the market that is there and having some food - I had a falafel wrap, Kate and Becki had a bratwurst and Amy had a potato swirl. After that we headed back to the hostel for an early night ready for our visit to Australia Zoo early the next morning - the main reason for our visit to Brisbane.
Australia Zoo is the Zoo that Steve Irwin ran and I have been excited about going for ages. We left the hostel at about 7.15 because the bus takes about an hour and a half from Brisbane up to Beerwah (where the zoo is) which is on the sunshine coast.
The zoo has about 100 acres and is really interactive so whilst we were there we got to hold lizards, stroke koalas and - best of all, and the thing I've been most excited about - hand feed kangaroos. They are also famous for their crocodile shows of course so we watched two of those, one at the crocoseum and one just at the crocodile enclosure. The crocodiles are absolutely huge there and pretty terrifying but so awesome. I loved it, but I do wish we could have seen one of Steves shows himself. There are posters and videos of him everywhere, and the people that work there all speak about him in awe which is really cute and you can see how much everyone loved him.
This was also the first day in which we all split up. Sadly because of her visa appointment in Sydney Beck was the first to leave us, flying from Brisbane to Sydney on the 17th. This meant that she missed out on the zoo, but she'll be meeting us again on the 19th in Byron Bay, and we will be swapping Amy for her as she will be leaving us.
We got the bus back at 5 and we were all pretty tired so we had dinner and went to bed basically, leaving the next morning at about
9am for our bus to Byron Bay.
