Australia Zoo: Home of the Crocodile Hunter
- Klompie
- First Reviewer
- 4 out of 5
- Avg. Member Rating
- 9
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22
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Editor Pick
Roll Around with Kangaroos!
- April 16, 2009
- Rated 5 of 5 by
laurandave from Penrith, United Kingdom
Australia Zoo is definitely worth a visit! It is just north of Brisbane which is perfect for those on the east coast route! We did a trip up the East Coast of Australia in January 2009 and didnt even know we would be so close until somebody mentioned we should go as you can get up close with many of the animals! The way the Zoo is set up is totally different from any other Zoo I have been to (and I am generally not a big fan of zoos) it is even better than Singapore Zoo! It teaches you alot about snakes, crocs, and other species native to Oz - how to respect them in the wild and live alongside them rather than hurt of kill them! It has an amazing collection of snakes - even the most deadliest are there! We even saw and recognised a King Brown snake out in the Bush after we had been to the Zoo! The Tiger show is not to be missed. Each Tiger has a trainer who they know very well and they actually play with the Tigers in their enclosure e.g. throwing footballs for them (and getting the footballs off them when they are playing). They almost play fight with the Tigers who love it!! The whole ethos of the Zoo is very heartwarming and you can a feel for how all the staff just love working with and looking after animals. All animals have massive enclosures only part of which can be seen by visitors so if they get sick of being looked at they can go and hide! The best bit for me was walking through the kangaroo enclosure where kangaroos can roam around freely and you can lie down with them stroke them and feed them. The only thing the zoo asks is that the kangaroos are left alone when they are in certain fenced off areas and that children, dont run around and shout near to the kangaroos! I also fed an elephant and stroked a Koala. We had such an amazing day that I would recommened it to anyone. It is quite expensive but if you are traveling all the way to Oz to do the East Coast it is definitely worth the money - you can get discount if you have a Student Card or a YHA card too.
Editor Pick
Australia Zoo
- May 28, 2006
- Rated 5 of 5 by
dolphoto from San Jose, California
Steve Irwin has become the iconic Aussie wild man. Love him or hate him, don't let your feelings interfere with enjoying Australia Zoo. This is a very special place that offers some one-of-a-kind experiences. About an hour north of Brisbane, this is a very easy day trip. It also makes a great stop on the way from Brisbane to more northern parts of Queensland.
From the moment you arrive, you know this is no ordinary zoo. Before paying a penny, there is one of the workers who appears on the show, posing with a camel and visitors. Close-up encounters are possible throughout the day. Keep your eyes open as you never know when someone might walk by holding a Tasmanian devil!
There are two major shows done in the "Crocoseum" during the day. One is the mandatory crocodile show. Not being a reptile fan, I skipped that one. The other is a fabulous free-flight show. Unlike some shows where birds just fly from point to point, the macaws in this show flew all around the stadium.
The shows are only the start. Exhibits are spacious, and the animals appear quite at home. Other than platypus, all the major species seemed to be there. One special place is the main koala enclosure near the back of the zoo. It was the only place in Australia (other than something special coming up) where I saw joeys with their moms. Nothing quite as photogenic. There is a large area where one may feed kangaroos. If the kangaroos are hungry, that is. They weren't on my visit.
Upstairs behind the Crocoseum is a full food court. The array of choices is dazzling and the quality exceeds that of most tourist attractions. The area is spacious with plenty of room to find the spot that's right for you.
What many visitors unfortunately miss are the behind the scenes tours. There are several options and they are very reasonably priced. I chose the Australian Wildlife Hospital tour and was thrilled that I did. Since nobody else signed up, I had the place and my guide all to myself. Injured animals from a wide area end up at the hospital. When I got there, a kangaroo was having an ultrasound. The guide introduced me to several of the residents, long-term and temporary. The highlight of the tour, however, were the koalas, especially the babies. Having just seen the babies in the park, I felt jaded. That was until I saw one little baby peeking out of the pouch for the first time. Too young to have all its fur yet, it barely looked like a koala. Being the only guest, there was no rush and I was allowed to take all the pictures I wanted, nice and close up.
Other special animal encounters include tigers, cheetahs, dingos, tortoises, possums, and wombats. I only wish I had time to do more of them.
From journal By Crikey! Australia Zoo
Editor Pick
Australia Zoo: Home of the Crocodile Hunter pt. 3
- May 16, 2006
- Rated 3 of 5 by
stomps from Houston, Texas
This review is a continuation of Australia Zoo, part 2.
Once we had enough of the roos, we headed off to the newest portion of the zoo. This was a fair walk from the kangaroo paddocks, the closest part of the original zoo, but if you were sick of walking by this point, there was always the option of taking the tram. Just beware of entirely too enthusiastic “tour guides.”
This section of the zoo had more typical zoo animals, with the tigers being the most touted. There was a large viewing area but the tigers mainly just lounged, so we went and saw the much more interesting elephants. These were particularly interesting because they were dirt-of-the-outback red. We finally figured out that they were this color because of the dirt baths they take, not because Steve dyed them red to make them different.
We got there just in time for feeding at 2:45pm. All interested parties lined up in three lines and the elephants were brought over. Everyone was then handed some sort of food—a carrot, an apple, etc. Then, as a park photographer snapped away, the elephants kindly replaced each person’s offered with a handful of elephant snot. Luckily, there was a bathroom nearby with plenty of sinks. The park attempted to hawk the photographs they took to us later, only letting us keep tiny proofs for free which had “Australia Zoo” written all over them. We just took these and photoshopped them later!
We then wandered back into the original park because there wasn’t much else to do in the new section, which was very much under construction. Once back in the main zoo, we saw the highlight of the day—the wombats. At Lone Pine, we had seen one very lethargic fat-looking animal sitting under a log and weren’t very impressed. These wombats totally reversed our opinion of the species. Wombats are adorable, round little animals with stubby legs and a huge appetite—rather noticeable when another zoo-goer accidentally dropped his map into the enclosure and a wombat proceeded to devour it! We finally got the zoo-keeper's attention so it didn’t quite finish before having Steve’s grinning face pried from his jaws.
The zookeeper wasn’t paying attention because she was too busy training another wombat to walk on a leash. Not sure why this is a necessary skill in wombats, but apparently it is. The thing was absolutely adorable walking on it though.
Overall, the AZ experience was a good one, although if the Australian government wanted a face for Big Brother, Steve’s got it down. His grinning visage, normally blown up entirely too much, peeks at you from around every corner, watching your every move. There’s plenty more animals that I don’t have the room to describe, including the deadly variety (a whole room full of them), to be seen here, so if you need a good day out and don’t mind the cost, the AZ is a good place to go.
From journal People in the Glass Houses Shouldn't Throw Stones
Editor Pick
Australia Zoo: Home of the Crocodile Hunter pt. 2
- May 11, 2006
- Rated 3 of 5 by
stomps from Houston, Texas
This review is a continuation of my Australia Zoo review. We stayed through the show, which was on the whole the most uninteresting of them all. There was no wrestling with tigers or parrots landing on women's heads, only sitting crocodiles with trainers that kept well away from them and tossed them food every once in a while.
I found that walking through the crocodile area in the zoo was much more interesting than the show, because we got to see the crocs from a fairly close angle. This made them much more disturbing, since most of them were sitting with their eyes peeking out of the water, waiting to eat you. Casper the albino croc had an interesting story on the outside of his enclosure--apparently Steve says he's the most angry animal at the entire zoo. He was sitting in the corner, moping. I especially liked the signs on all of the croc enclosures, informing you not to feed the crocs or jump the fence. Anyone that wants to jump the fence really deserves to be eaten. This possibly includes Steve Irwin himself.
There was plenty of other wildlife along with the crocs. We found three separate koala enclosures, one fairly close to the Crocoseum, one near the kangaroo enclosure, and one on the cassowary viewing deck. There are lots of birds, including cockatoos and kookaburras. I didn't find any cockatoos that would have conversations with me, so I had to suffice with talking to my friends instead.
We decided that Steve must give all of his animals speed so they are more interesting, because everything we saw was much more lively than at Lone Pine, possibly with the exception of the koalas, which I don't think have the genetic capability of being lively. They're cute enough just relaxing in the trees anyway. The Tasmanian devils truly were Taz from Looney Tunes--they just continually ran around in circles, chasing each other. They followed the exact same path around the cage the entire time we watched them and we were just waiting for the tornadoes to whirl up behind them.
The roos were more interesting than those at Lone Pine for the sole reason that the joeys were older by this point and provided much more amusement. We didn't actually see any hopping around on their own, but we quickly realized that cartoons aren't always accurate because we didn't see any sticking their heads out of their mother's pouch either. All we saw were lazing mothers with large feet sticking out of their stomach. They all looked more like they had deformed extra legs on their stomach.
This review is continued in Australia Zoo, part 3.
From journal People in the Glass Houses Shouldn't Throw Stones
Editor Pick
Australia Zoo: Home of the Crocodile Hunter
- May 11, 2006
- Rated 3 of 5 by
stomps from Houston, Texas
The Australia Zoo was not high on my priority list by the end of my second month in Brisbane: I had already visited Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary (a much shorter drive, being in Zone 3 rather than Zone 14), which offered all the Australian fauna any foreigner has ever dreamed of seeing. On top of this, I had been lucky enough to see some of the animals in the wild, so the only thing I was really missing out on were the crocs (which would have been slightly less fun to meet in the wild than say... a kangaroo). However, my friend really wanted to meet Steve Irwin, Australia's famed (or is it notorious?) Crocodile Hunter. She had heard that public holidays were the best chance to see Steve, since he was most likely to be back at the zoo, rather than touring around the world making a fool out of himself on the Tonight Show and the like. So, Anzac Day came around and we headed to Beerwah.
The trip itself took around an hour and a half. From Central station, it's important to take the express to Nambour, which leaves every half hour or so during peak times and every hour otherwise, rather than the train to Caboolture. The express only stops at three stations before Caboolture and cuts the travel time immensely. This train takes you directly to Beerwah, where there is normally a double decker bus waiting to take the disembarking herds to the zoo just down the road.
The zoo isn't hard to miss--there's approximately eleventy billion signs featuring Steve Irwin and his crocs along the road, and that's only between the train station and the zoo! The entrance fee was absolutely ridiculous and $7 more than listed in our edition of Lonely Planet--but Steve knows that once you've travelled this far, you're not going to turn around. So, sadly, I coughed up the ~$32 and attempted not to think of the number of beers that would buy on a 2-for-1 night at the RE.
Once inside, our first stop was at the Crocoseum. We had left Brisbane early enough to catch the morning shows inside the huge stadium, since this was where we were likely to see Steve possibly dangling his poor child over a hungry crocodile. There was an array of different wildlife shows, each taking around 30 minutes or so--we saw dangerous snakes, playful tigers, soaring birds (including the kookaburra, which did not whoop, the sound we so *fondly* knew it by), and finally, the crocs. Steve, however, did not attend, and it was hilarious to see the stadium's reaction when they realized this. Obviously, many people had the same motivations as my friend in coming to the zoo, because when two unrecognizable trainers came out, the stadium emptied like Minute Maid Park in the top of the 9th when the Astros are losing.
This review is continued in Australia Zoo, part 2.
From journal People in the Glass Houses Shouldn't Throw Stones