Sometimes you have an experience that you will forever remember, and today at Currumbin Sanctuary was one of those times. I will never, ever forget one particular moment from this day. But more about that shortly.
Our original plan for today was to go to Dreamworld, but they were closed still and would in fact remain closed for over a month. So we decided to go to Currumbin Sanctuary instead – not a place I would have chosen myself but we did have an American Tourist with us, and I thought maybe he should get to experience some of those classic Australian experiences that you never forget. Like holding a koala, and/or a snake, even though said American tourist was a little afraid of snakes.
There you have a water dragon sitting on top of a freshwater crocodile.
Me, I completely am not scared of snakes. Once upon a time I was, but then I became a zoo volunteer and somewhere along the way grew to absolutely love them.
As always, getting up at 5am tends to get the day started very early and we were in the car by 7:40am on our way to the place, whch opened at 8am. The place was already chock full of students from places like Japan and China, who had arrived early for the bird feeding which happens just at the entrance to the park, and they were now queuing to get into the park. Luckily this was a quick process.
We wandered around the park mostly trying to avoid the other people while still getting to see the animals. That photo above is two male kangaroos having a bit of a fight. That is pretty normal behaviour for them – the volunteer nearby was a bit worried about the tourists getting too close.
In trying to avoid the other people we actually stumbled upon my favourite experience of the day, the one moment I will never forget. We had found a place to sit slightly up hill near the crocodiles and were relaxing when two Eastern Water Dragons decided to have a bit of a territory fight right in front of us. Nobody got hurt but the posturing and circling was Quite A Thing To See.
We decided to take in a couple of the shows – the free bird flight show was great, and the snake show even better. While waiting for these shows we decided to purchase some photo opportunities – The Other Half got a photo with an owl, and Sephyroth and I got a photo with a snake, plus koala holding photos for everyone. You get to hold a koala, and you get to hold a koala, everyone gets to hold a koala for a very reasonable price which I cannot recall but it was all packaged together for us very nicely.
And there you see our new koala friend just about to be handed to Sephyroth. I have to tell you, I had a special moment with that koala. We talked. It was a thing of beauty.
All up we spent about 4 hours at Currumbin. We were not sure what to have for lunch, nothing there appealed to us. We threw around a few options, then those zucchini chips called us and we decided to visit Grill’d at Pacific Fair again on the way back to the apartment. On the way back to the car, we visited HoneyWorld and bought some honey – which I have been mixing into my Greek Yoghurt for a good couple of months now.. There was also SurfWorld but that did not tempt us. Everything is a world, on the Gold Coast.
If we had gone to Dreamworld this day, we had planned to stop at NightQuarter on the way back. This was our one and only planned eat out at dinner time meal, so we decided to head out to Helensvale and keep our appointment with some Cronuts, which I had read about in advance. Cronuts are a cross between a croissant and a donut. They are awesome.
But before one ate the sweets, one had to eat the dinner. That is a thing, apparently. There were samples of various things given out – Sephyroth and I ended up with two things we sampled, calamari and juice which happened to be right next to each other, while The Other Half went for a curly sausage of some kind.
Both of these things were extremely delicious but so filling we did not have space for the cronuts. So we bought them and took them back to the apartment, where we cut them in half and shared different flavours.
Cinnamon
Salted Caramel with Chocolate
All in all, this was probably my favourite Gold Coast day. Though tomorrow, we did something pretty cool, which I will tell you about next Wednesday!
Sounds like a terrific day. I would have loved to have seen the water dragons sparring.
Love the Big Reds and the water dragons. I’ve heard of cronuts but don’t think I’ll ever try one.
So glad you had a foreign visitor. Just think what you’d been missing! (Snakes still make me nervous.)