A sea day later we found ourselves in Brisbane and my tour would take me an hour and a half north to The Australia Zoo.

Bought by the legendary crocodile hunter Steve Irwin, it’s now run by his family and we visited on what would have been his 61st birthday with his son Robert in action, feeding the crocs – surreal or what!

Generally I’m not a huge fan of zoos, here the animals did appear to be well cared for, all pens were really big and they did put huge emphasis on conservation and in the main, local animals were the focus.

It’s in Queensland, the only state where it’s still legal to hold a koala and if you wanted to do this it was just an extra $40. I did it in 2017 at the Lone Pine, I chose not to this time, but I did enjoy a stroll around the koala island and nursery

They sleep for 18 hours a day, is it wrong to be jealous of a koala?

There was the standard walk through Kangaroo field, you could buy food to feed them, not that the Roos seemed overly hungry There were a lot of families in so I guess they’d been well fed.

The main difference in this zoo is the emphasis on crocodiles and the crocodile show, I duly took my seat at 1.15 a little unsure about it all.

The first 10 minutes were quite frankly boring. Two female keepers tried to whip up the crowd, encouraging shouts of ‘crikey’ and bird or monkey impressions, things improved with the arrival of the birds, the black cockatoo taking roost in the rafters was funny but he did eventually decide to join in and do his money trick, collecting $5 from an audience member before later returning this, and all the Macaws swooping over the arena was spectacular

Monty I guess was the star of the show, it was interesting to see him move through the crystal clear water and I saw first hand on my later crocodile safari how true it was that they simply disappear into the muddy rivers, but is it really a good idea to lie down infront of a crocodile? The keeper didn’t think so, he got straight back up again, that’s all ok till something goes wrong!

This reads like I didn’t enjoy the zoo, which is wrong, I absolutely did enjoy it, I just prefer to see animals in the wild, so I really really enjoyed my next tour…