2nd day, Brisbane, Australia

Back for more. My brother arrived the morning of the 2nd day after a direct flight from San Diego. We head out to an animal preserve where we are going to see koalas and kangaroos!



The place is called Lone Pine and it's by a river. Alright that sentence was really awkward, but moving on.


My first encounter w/ a kangaroo. There were a ton of kangas there just lounging around. There weren't that many hopping to and fro but when they did it was pretty cool. I mean you've seen kangaroos hop on TV and in the movies but to see it in person was cool because it's so different from any other animal you've ever seen, well except maybe for bunnies...



We also saw a couple w/ joeys in their pouches. That was cool, no joeys outside of their mom's pouches though. Joey, that's like a baby kangaroo and a pretty good word for scrabble!


There were also emu's there, this one's about as tall as me standing up. Unfortunately the thing just kinda sat there looking at us weird.






I'm sure you're dying to see the koalas, we were too, until we actually saw them. Koalas are very lazy creatures, they just sat there sleeping. We thought they were dead. But they weren't, they're just super lazy. They also had a couple of koalas there that were the products of artificial insemination. That was pretty cool.


Then we came across this chubby little monster. Anyone care to guess what it is? Give up? Click here for the answer. And here for a mug only a mother could love.


We also saw these two dingos there. They were both white and they were brothers. There was a zookeeper there trying to train them. Apparently they have a intense fear of ropes and they wanted to use the ropes to hang food off them during feedings. So the guy walks in and sits down in the middle and lays the rope nearby and takes out pieces of raw chicken. The dingos approach cautiously but never get close enough to the rope or the chicken. We sat there for a good 20 minutes waiting for them to get comfy enough to take the food from the trainer's hands. But they never did. The one you see here is the calmer one, the other brother in the cage next to this one was walking around the cage in an agitated way. They were really cool looking dogs.



These are a couple of the artificially inseminated koalas, apparently a first or something.


This parrot was interesting. There were a few, but we talked to two. The first one just kept saying hello when you tell it hello. It left, apparently bored as we were. The second one was more interesting. It doesn't say hello. In fact it said nothing the first couple of minutes. It was my cousin and I there and his mom called us to leave, so we walked away while saying goodbye to parrot #2. But then we hear this parroty "Goodbye." We turn around and we try to get it to say goodbye again but it wouldn't. Instead it goes "Scratch, scratch." Well what is an American to do when a parrot asks for a good scratch? You scratch. When we stuck our finger between the bars, it held its head closer to the cage. I guess he's had other suckers...err tourists scratch it before and it knows the drill. So we give it a good scratch, we pull away and it goes "Scratch, scratch." Talk about pavlov's parrot! We scratched him and we left and it gave us a nice "Goodbye" as we walked away. That was worth the ticket to Australia! I actually took a sideways video of this, but too large to post.


Artsy picture


We're far from home!


After that we went to Chinatown and found these. I'm not sure that was appropriate after the day we had. At least they didn't have any stuffed white parrots...

After that we went home and chilled there the rest of the night.