Brisbane and Lone Pine

Last weekend I went to Brisbane with the intent of going to the Valley Fiesta. The Valley is ‘the’ trendy place to be in Brisbane. We made it to Brisbane around lunch time on Saturday and ate lunch at a ‘gourmet’ burger place which was actually really good.

We stayed at a friend’s brother’s apartment located just near the Valley which was the best possible location. Perusing the markets was really fun. Retro stuff is really in fashion here which is funny to me because a lot of people dress 80’s style thinking it’s popular. So if you’re dressing like it’s the 80’s, are 60’s and 70’s really that retro? I don’t know.

Brisbane (the capital of QLD) is a fun city. There’s a river that runs at a swirly diagonal through the city. We took the river ferry into South Bank (a main part of the city) and it was fun to see the city from the water.

We had a fun time going out Saturday night, but the best part of my trip to Brisbane though was our trip to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary on Sunday. Located just outside of the city, it’s the world’s first and largest koala sanctuary. It is also one of the few places you can still “cuddle” a koala. Supposedly, they ensure that each animal is handled for less than 30 minutes/day and has every 3^rd day off. I was sort of torn about actually holding the koala, but decided to do it. They instruct you to make a ‘basket’ with your hands and then they set the koala in it and put its paws on your shoulder. Or in my case, my shoulder and my boob. The koala is eating the whole time so it’s sort of oblivious to the fact it’s being held and photographed. The sanctuary employee (koala lady?) told us that they’re indifferent to being held. So that made me feel better. After, we got to stroke the koala’s back. Its fur is a lot more coarse than I was expecting. Still very cute though..

The cool thing about Lone Pine is that it’s almost like a big farm. Very few of the animals were in cages. The Koalas were split up into little areas that had a low fence sort of structure around them and included a few trees. So you could get within 3 or 4 feet of them with no (glass or wire) barrier. It was fun to observe the way the moved and situated themselves in trees. Koalas use up a lot of energy digesting their food so that’s why they have to sleep so much. Some of them were fairly active.

The other fun parts of Lone Pine are the wallabies and kangaroos. There’s a huge reserve where you go through the gate and then you can feed the wallabies and kangaroos. Its really neat to be able to just sit on the grass and watch the animals moving around you. They were so lazy and domesticated though! They knew that people all wanted to feed them so they would wait for the people to approach them rather than hop up to people. I momentarily contemplated chasing them so I could actually see them hop. There were a few moving around towards the back, but a lot of them were just laying down soaking up the sun. I didn’t realize how powerful their tails were and how they use it as sort of a 5^th leg. Very cool.

At the back of the reserve, there was a mama and a joey. Kangaroos have some crazy ability to hang on to a fertilized cell until the first baby is out and then re-instate the second one so effectively it’s like they’re continuously pregnant. Anyhow, it was really cool to see the joey in the mom’s pouch. Oh and there were a few random emus wandering around the kangaroo part too.