Thursday 18th July, Mackay, Qld Australia!)   21:06.733S  149:13.6E  

Today's Blog by David (Time zone BST +9.00; UTC +10.00)

G’day all!

We left you to go in search of Kangaroos and Koalas.  It didn’t take too long to hunt them down …...  But first….

We stayed at the Quay West Apartments overlooking the Botanical Gardens in Brisbane – it is a place I would recommend to you all if you are happy to go self-catering.  It was handy for the city, the Maritime Museum – in fact anything we wanted to do – even the South Bank:

The South Bank

A putative Banyan Tree (which, it seems,  is simply a kind of Fig) in the Botanical Gardens

One of the ubiquitous White Ibis in the Botanical Gardens

From Brisbane we headed north, but not before we had had our

First Koala Experience:

And  discovered that Kangaroos find it just as hard to understand traffic signals  as we do:

We then headed north to Noosa in search of  K³ ₌  Kin. This in the shape of Mike’s (Simone’s Father = AKA Walter) Niece,   Ann (AKA Simone’s Cousin). 

The cognoscenti will Note the Revitt resemblance:

Simone with Cousin Ann and a rather handsome (if a little grumpy) guy they know…..

To be fair, while we were with Ann, we saw Koala in the “Wild”, (if you can call one up a tree in a Noosa National Park: “wild”). We later found one with an itch for Simone to scratch.

(BTW:  Koalas eat for four hours a day and sleep for 20, which is perhaps  why Simone spent so much time studying them …?):

Heading further north from Noosa,  we stopped in Hervey Bay, Maryborough, Agnes Water and Rockhampton. What was something of a surprise was that many of the towns had buildings from the late 19^th or early 20^th centuries ( a surprise in contrast e.g. to America which was settled around the same time. Some were  attractive to look at.

These are in Maryborough:

We really did enjoy this trip – especially meeting Ann’s Family,  who were very generous and entertained us at very short notice.  However …….

Not everyone was so pleased to see us….

On the other hand when we visited Rockhampton Botanical Gardens, these Lorikeets did appear happy to see us and filled the trees when we found them ….

We  felt really quite privileged to be so close to such colourful birds…

.

Privileged that is, until we tried to eat breakfast the following morning!

So – the Road Trip is over.  “No worries”, though. We are back aboard and dealing with the usual trivia of making the boat work. More on that, a report on Wayne’s Wanton Wangles and perhaps Ray’s Recent Relapse in the next day or so.

Sweet!