Hervey Bay would be our last official beach stop, at least for a few days, as we entered the theme park phase of our travels. Today's itinerary would take us into Brisbane and beyond but not before we made a small detour to see Steve Irwin's legacy at the Australia Zoo about an hour outside of Brisbane.
Though his death was tragic and you may not have agreed with his particular approach to conservation - the Croc Hunter's legacy in all of its "materialness" is nonetheless impressive. His Australia Zoo is by all accounts an excellent facility that beautfiully showcases this country's varied and very threatenend wildlife. We spent the better part of the day trolling the cages and enclosures and were impressed by the Komodo Dragons, Tasmainian Devil, Dingos, Koalas, venomous snakes and countless crocs. The show in the 5000 seat main stadium was very cool with a trainer standing three feet from a croc and feeding him chicken bits by hand. Worked for me.
What's at the same time both kitsche and cool is the way Irwin's wife and entire family have continued to roll his legacy out into a million dollar empire. In one of the biggest gift shops I have ever seen, you can buy Steve Irwin games, hats, action figures, surfwear, footwear, fridge magnets, playing cards, shot glasses and virtually anything else your heart might desire. I was taken by the stuff more than the rest of the family - though Alex managed to negotiate a metre long rubber snake - and for whatever reason (that Linton still does not quite understand) I bought a "Steve Lives" surfwear t-shirt. I guess I thought it was unique and I liked the sentiment. I guess. My favourite part of the park was the snake display where we saw 9 of the 10 most venomous snakes in the world which all conveniently reside in Australia! Our trepidation was only slightly abated by the reassurances that these snakes would be no threat as long as we left them alone...
After a few more crocs, a few birds of prey, and a wombat or two, we felt we had "done" the park pretty well and stumbled into our camper around closing time, giving ourselves just two hours to get across Brisbane. Unfortunately, Brisbane is a big city, with lots of construction, thousands of commuters, and we were entering the fray at rush hour. This would be the challenge for which the crack team of Carter and Darling had been training and we would need all of our split second decision making and clutch grinding, blind-spot-checking abilities to negotiate successfully. Fortunately, we were finally driving on the first 4 lane highways of our trip allowing us to speed up a bit and for me to feel like I could worry a little bit less about oncoming traffic! The toughest part might have been the Gateway bridge which links the airport to the rest of the city. It is a humongously high toll bridge that effectively siphons thousands of cars down to 8 lanes and then back out again. We managed to not drive off of it, to pay the right toll, in the right lane, not crash through the barrier or make any bells go off, and leave without incident. I certainly breathed a sigh of relief after hurtling that particular barrier that reminded me a ton of paying the toll on the Champlain Bridge on the way to Magog.
Thus, having cut off only a hand full of irate Brisbane commuters we eventually found our Caravan Park on the southern side of Brisbane and rolled into our site but not before loading up on some wicked Chinese food and a few more groceries. Patting oursleves on the back for traffic well negotiated and another day of surviving the busier roads of Australia, we tumbled into our table/bed tired but content, with visions of snakes and traffic snarls swimming in our heads.
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