Liz and Eli on the Move

I wanted to post some good Australia pictures before we leave for Thailand
tomorrow but I am just too tired to explain what’s going on in this
picture. You will have to use your imagination to fill in the blanks…

Hanging out at the Lone PIne Koala Sanctuary in Brisbane.

This is the remains of a luxury liner that used to do an
Auckland-Melbourne-San Francisco-Vancouver route in the early nineteen
hundreds. It was bought by Japan for scrap metal in the early forties
but hit a reef in transit and was abandoned here.

World’s largest sand island! Our two-day trip to Fraser Island was a
highlight of our time here. Though the island is a “sand island”, it
supports a rain forest and other environments because tree roots are able to
reach deep enough to access a fresh water source. In addition, there are
many fresh water lakes throughout the island that were lovely to swim in.
At night, we were able to see more stars than I’ve ever seen from land- a
really clear view of the Milky Way and constellations that we don’t get to
see on our half of the world.

… it sometimes felt like to be a backpacker in Australia.

Our natural disaster tour of Australia continued on our bus ride Tuesday
from Port Macquarie north to Byron Bay. The rain just will not end! We saw
many flooded fields and rivers out the greyhound bus window and drove on
some waterlogged roads as well. We also saw our first kangaroos or
wallabies on the bus ride. I couldn’t tell how they felt about all this
rain. The past two days have been start-stop rain, rather than continuous
rain, so that’s a little improvement!

The rain stopped for long enough on Monday that we were able to leave our
hostel in Port Macquarie and visit the local Koala Hospital. The lovely
lady below is a permanent resident because she suffers from arthritis so
badly that she can’t climb trees well enough to feed herself. Something
interesting we learned (at least I find it so) is that though there are over
700 types of eucalyptus trees here in Australia, koalas will only eat the
leaves of about 70 or 80 of those. Their daily meals at the hospital
include 3 different types of leaves for the sake of leaf variety. Yum!
We were excited to have out first non-hospitalized Australian wildlife
sighting later that afternoon. We saw a kookaburra in a tree. He did not
laugh at us.