Sweet, Cuddly Koalas...

July 16, 2012

BRISBANE, QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA – We had an absolutely fabulous day on arrival to Australia! Brisbane had seen rain every day for two weeks straight, and we were quite prepared for some lousy weather, but as we descended and the sun came up, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky! Once we landed, we had a brief quarantine on the plane (something new for me), then did the standard painful hour wait for no reason at immigration. We all got our stamps, nobody lost any luggage, and then did the K-9 sniffer dog lines for customs, and luckily everyone listened and the dogs didn’t find anything.

We turned the corner into the public area of the airport, made a left, and there was our Delegation Manager, Anthony! To give you a little background, Anthony just did this trip with another group before us, and in total we are his fourth People to People delegation over two summers. Beyond that, however, he has some extremely impressive travel experience, having been to six continents (I am giving him a bit of a hard time about Antarctica, haha), but he has also been to some 85ish countries, WAY more than whatever number I am at (I think around 30).

After we met Anthony, some of the students exchanged $USD to $AUD, and we headed off to meet Rob, our coach driver while we are here in Queensland. We loaded the coach and set off on our first coach ride as a full delegation – our first destination? The Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary!!!

The Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary is a private non-profit that started off with just two Koalas, but has since grown to the size of a large zoo, protecting all kinds of Australian animals – some are popular, like the koala and the kangaroo, and others are rare birds and other species that most people don’t even know. Everyone got to hold a koala, which was awesome! When I was at Taronga Zoo in Sydney in August 2011, I paid extra for the “koala experience” that got me very up and close to them, but I wasn’t allowed to touch the koala. Here, not only were we touching them, but holding them in a big koala hug! It was really quite awesome – the koala smelled horrible, but that’s mainly a product of them eating nothing but eucalyptus leaves all day long. Their cuteness and the softness of their fur was more than worth it, even factoring in the smell. In addition to the koalas, students fed kangaroos and their baby joeys, saw a very active platypus, a Tasmanian devil, and other animals. We also saw the “Birds of Prey” show, where one of our students actually got to have a bird land on her arm, which was impressive given the wingspan of the bird was about as wide as she is tall.

July 16, 2012 - Holding an ADORABLE Koala at Lone Pine, Queensland!

After our first real Australian meal at Lone Pine (chips with tomato sauce = fries with ketchup), we had a short city tour of the city of Brisbane. Brisbane is the third-largest city in Australia (after Sydney and Melbourne) and is the capital of Queensland, which as a state essentially covers the northeast corner of the country, along with the Great Barrier Reef (which runs adjacent to the Queensland coast). In addition to Brisbane’s Parliament House, one really interesting place we passed by was General Douglas MacArthur’s US Pacific WWII HQ, a building in the CBD (CBD = Central Business District = “Downtown”). By hosting the US HQ for the Pacific theater of war, Brisbane became the most important city between Honolulu and Tokyo. Everybody knows all about the battles at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Did you know their preparations and logistics were made from Brisbane? We also saw Cathedral Square and Brisbane Square, the two main central parts of the CBD, and the Botanical Gardens, which lay adjacent to the Brisbane River. In late-2010/early-2011 the Brisbane River flooded to historical levels, due to torrential rains combined with poor dam management upriver. The resulting floods made international and even US news, which you may recall – standing some 30+ feet above the current water level, Anthony told us we would have been underwater at the height of those floods. Pretty hard to imagine all of that water flowing through the middle of a major city.

Next stop is Caloundra, a small town an hour north of here on the coast, where we will be staying two nights.