RadioRoryTwo quick stories before leaving the land of Midnight Oil.
I swung by the Australia Zoo. It’s the place made famous by the late Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin yet is now haunted by his daughter, Bindi. The zoo is pretty straight forward but I can get gator (croc) wrestling at home and there isn’t some big wow factor or thrill ride.
There are dingoes!
Fair warning: You will be subjected to recordings of a young Bindi Irwin singing about the earth and friends and something else I couldn’t quite hear through the blood that was pouring from my ears. Oooff…it’s bad, it’s loud, and it’s repetitive.
Other than earplugs, the only advice I have is to plan ahead for a trip to this zoo. It offers lots of different animal encounters that have to be booked in advance, many of them early in the morning. All of them have an added fee.
One thing really ticked me off at the time. You can get your picture taken holding a koala bear but you have to buy their photo package with it. You know, it has the DVD, the CD, thumb drive, and the 8×10 glossy in the cardboard holder. At this point, I’ve got nine months of travel ahead of me and I don’t want to be carrying that crap around. I offered to pay for the full package if they would just take the picture with my own camera. No sale. They don’t want to be held liable if they broke my camera.
For someone singing about the environment all day, Bindi should have a photo option that doesn’t generate so much paper and plastic waste!
West Wing In Australia
The plan was to catch an early flight from Gold Coast, Australia to Auckland, New Zealand so I grabbed a room at a Best Western near the airport (Oh the glamour of it all). The place was great, but the woman who worked at the front desk was even better. She went out of her way to explain that the hotel and the airport are in different time zones! The hotel is in New South Wales but the airport is in Queensland. Fans of “The West Wing” will understand why this situation created so much anxiety!
Her advice was to ignore all the clocks and set my watch to airport time so I wouldn’t be late. Worked like a charm.