I must be careful on what I wright about Brisbane as Anwyn will be living there soon :-)
After Sydney and Melbourne, Brisbane definitely feels smaller and relaxed. The city shows several signs of recent manicure operations, especially in its South Bank where a garden area has revived the waterfront. It even includes a beach which is certainly very welcome for the people trapped in the city's current rain season muggyness.
A lot of our time in Brisbane was unfortunately spent trying to change our flights to extend the trip a couple of weeks. Having been told it was easy to change dates on round the world tickets, we innocently believed it would all be solved in one quick phone call!! We won't bore you with the details but basically OneWorld airlines happily rebook your tickets but forget to tell the other airlines about it and fail to cancel your original flights. Following several hours of productive calls to American Airlines' call centre, Cathay Pacific and trips to the Qantas office (who didn't actually do anything but kindly offered to put a little sticker on our paper tickets in return for $80). So we would have probably ended up stuck in Cairns or Hong Kong for all eternity, and guess what, it would have been all our fault too.
After all this stress I needed some animal therapy (it had now been a while since the last hostel with pets). Fortunately, the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary is quite close to Brisbane, so I dragged Tom for another visit to those cute little fluff balls. On his last visit to Australia Tom visited the exact same place. He was posing for the mandatory "I've-been-to-Australia-and-hugged-a-k"oalaouristic photo when a bus load of screaming overexcited japanese tourists showed up. They made such a racket that the koala got distressed and tried to scratchTom's eyeballs out. The resulting photo looked like Tom was about to drop kick the Koala rather than hug it! Needless is to say that Tom is traumatised to this day and part of this trip has been spent on me trying to convince him that koalas are nice and sweet instead of clawed, grumpy stinkbags. Seeing them dozing off on tree had helped, but this was the ultimate test: could Tom get over his Koala issues?
Well, I very happily hugged a cute little koala and decided on the spot that handling them was the job for me! I have always wanted to hold one and now it was happening! And it didn't disappoint me one bit, quite the contrary. Koalas are the perfect size, fluffiness and temperament, the perfect pets! Tom still didn't pose for the traditional Koala photo, did agree to one photo.........
We spent a while more in the park taking more photos of koalas having their meal or just a nap (I have to admit they don't do much more than that). Suddenly there was this commotion around one of the koala enclosures and I finally understood why Tom had been so annoyed with the Japanese tourists before. A large group had arrived and were seriously freaking out the koalas! They were shouting and screeching and blinding the koalas with their flashes shot just millimetres of the animals. The koalas were clearly upset and instead of sleepily gazing at them from their perches some had climbed down to the floor and were trying to escape the enclosure anywhere they could. They even made these high pitched screams (the koalas, but the tourists as well) which I never thought they could do. How disrespectful, for both animals and fellow visitors, not so much behaving like they owned the place but so excited that they became oblivious about anything else in the world.
"Aaagggghhh, i'm sure there must be an escape route round here somewhere......."
"Grrrhhh, just try pointing it over here, camera boy!"We moved away and decided to go feed the kangaroos. These were lazily lying under the trees in the midday heat. You can see how used to people they are: some didn't bother moving when you approached them and instead expected to be fed while remaining lying down. It was funny to feel their warm breath in our hands as we gave them food pellets. Here we were, enjoying the close contact with these relaxed animals and watching them fall asleep while chewing, when several high pitched screams announced the arrival of the Japanese. I was turning into Tom, my level of tolerance getting dangerously low and even the roo I was feeding seemed to be thinking "Oh dear, not them again!". Within seconds all the kangaroos were up and hopping away as fast as they could. Some became trapped in by the japanese crowd, whowent on shreeking and proceeded to take silly photos. One of them tried to ride one of the larger roos, which fortunately just hopped out from under the guy. Another girl was so noisy that the kangaroo she was trying to force feed got scared and jump off, hiting her in the head (haha).
We made a move again, before I accidentely hit one of them. OK, so Tom was right about how annoying japanese tourists can be, capable of turning even dozy fluffy koalas into blood thirsty monsters. We visited the sleepy wombats, the disturbingly tall (at least for me) emus and other australian birds like the cassoary, lorikeets, cockatoos and kookaburras. Disconcertingly, the Laughing Kookaburra actually sounds like a happy monkey. Weird...
On Brisbane we had one last cultural experience before we left: we went to a Andy Warhol exhibition. Apart from seeing live his better known works, we learned a lot about how his technique and subjects evolved during his career. However, the best part of the exhibition was a photo booth where you could make a Warhol-like composition of your photo. What started with traditional well composed photos quickly became an highly artistic photo shoot as imaginations run wild and initial inhibitions were forgotten. Needless is to say we stayed there until the museum closed, when a guard reminded us that everyone could see our photos, and that the last one would now be on display there overnight. Ooops...Beijinhos,
Vania
1 comment:
soooo cute!! now I've seen you with a koala I can believe they are real!!
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