Our path took us further down Bruce Highway today toward Brisbane (or Brissie) One thing to notice as we got further South was that the roads appeared to get bigger. After a while we actually hit a real motorway – with a dividing strip in the middle. Unfortunately, bigger streets also came with more traffic.
The weather was pretty shitty, at times it was pouring buckets, so we cut out all the beaches from our drive today. Instead we made our way to Beerwah. Beerwah is not as the name may indicate the capital of beer. No, it’s the capital of something almost as exciting though – the Crocodile Hunter. Once we had found the Steve Irwin Way, we also had found his great gift to the world, Australia Zoo. The entry was a whopping $52 per person but it was well worth it. The zoo pretty much housed only Australian animals with the exception of a few elephants and tigers. Each animal had a massive space to itself and they seemed pretty happy. Of course it was still raining but we didn’t care too much about that. We watched the wombats for a while, played with the roos, saw some interesting birds and of course there were crocs. Plenty of them, and big ones. Even though it was raining, the people in the zoo put on a croc show and got out Graham, some 7 foot saltie. Crikey! What a beauty! The handlers certainly had respect for the croc and the croc obviously didn’t care too much for them.
While in the zoo we also signed the petition to save Steve’s Place. In Queensland there is a 135,000 hectares wildlife reserve called the Steve Irwin Wildlife Reserve which is threatened by strip mining. Knowing that much of Australia’s flora and fauna is disappearing due to mining, hopefully the petition will help to save a little piece of planet and habitat for Australia’s native animals. http://www.savestevesplace.com/ It is a real shame that the croc hunter died the way he did as early as he did though he died doing what he loved. It’s definitely a good way to go and he is remembered by so many people and has definitely helped increased awareness in us to care more about the planet we live on. I am sure Terri, Bindi and Robert do their part to carry on his legacy.
After our excursion to Australia Zoo we went straight to Brissie though we were of course stuck in traffic for a bit. Our camp ground that we had picked out, Newmarket Garden, closed at 5pm and we were there 15 minutes before closing.
As it was pretty early and we didn’t feel tired Sylli and I made some more roo burgers which was the envy of the couple of people sitting around us while we were grilling them. Our friends from the UK had baked beans and toast and were loudly complaining about the huge bats that had pooped all over their tent. The way to go for 2 people is probably to rent one of the wicket campers or hippie campers or all the crazy cool looking little camper vans cruising around this country.
With our burgers, we had a couple of beers and moved on rather quickly to the single malt. I got to a point were I thought I could handle finishing the bottle. Well, we got close. Before we could finish the bottle though, I somehow ended up sleeping under our table in the van. We must have been rather loud too because the people next to us decided to put their music louder and louder to cover our laughter and noise.
