Christmas with Koalas!
Happy Monday!
I hope you had a great weekend. Tj and I went to the gym on Sunday and it was such a tough class… we were so tired and sore for the rest of the day. We went to lunch and then had a really nice Facetime session with some of Tj's friends in Europe. It was the perfect way to end the weekend.
Over Christmas we didn't have a lot of time off to travel home to see our family, so we took advantage of the few days we had to travel around Australia. We planned our Christmas trip really late, so it was hard to find affordable accommodation where we wanted to go. We decided to base ourselves in Brisbane for a few nights and do day trips. We wanted to hit the beach. And one of my good friends from Canada is currently living in Brisbane so it was the perfect opportunity to hang out with her.
Our plan was to spend Christmas Day at the beach. Except when we woke up it was pouring rain and not expected to stop anytime soon. A quick internet search turned up the perfect Christmas Day activity - we were going to see Koalas!
The Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary was one of the only places open on Christmas Day and it did not disappoint. Tickets were $38.00 each, and it was another $25.00 each to hold the Koalas and get our photo taken, although there is also the opportunity to pet one for free. They limit the number of people who can hold a koala, so when we got there we made sure to sign up right away, even though the session wasn't for a few hours.
We wandered around and looked at some of the other animals:
Kangaroos (we could feed them and pet them too!)
Tasmanian devils
Dingo puppies
Platypus
Snakes
Turtles
The highlight of the day was definitely the koalas though. Here are a few things we learned about koalas:
They are marsupials - not koala bears! They have a pouch just like kangaroos where they keep their joeys as they grow
They eat eucalypt leaves which don't give them a lot of energy - they need to sleep or rest for up to 20 hours a day!
When it was our turn to hold the koalas, we cradled our arms and they just put the little guys right in there. And omg it just hugged right onto me. It was so sweet. I did this before when I came to Australia years ago, but I remember that koala was stinky and my shirt smelled for the rest of the day. This girl didn't smell nearly as bad.
It cleared up a bit in the afternoon and when we went to the car to get our sunglasses, there was an incident where we lost our car keys. Someone must have picked up off the table thinking they were theirs. We spent a lot of time looking in the parking lot, but eventually, they turned up at the admission desk.
We spent a few hours by the rooftop pool at the hotel and then decided to head to the casino for dinner and some fun. We were sure that it would be open. Unfortunately, when we got there, it was closed until midnight! Bummer. We had a really fancy dinner at Hungry Jacks and Baskin Robbins and it was a great end to a great Christmas Day. If we couldn't spend the holidays with our families, it was nice to do something really memorable.