Adventures in Mt. Coot-tha!

This morning, I was up bright and early to meet Lindsay at the bus stop.

If you are sitting on the steps of the student admin building, this is the view:

And if you go through the hallway on the left side, you will get to the rest of the campus.

So once we took the bus into the city center, we walked around a bit, and came up these crazy, slightly scary, metal kangaroos :


After grabbing lunch at Hungry Jacks, aka Burger King, we caught the bus to the Mt. Coot-tha Botanic Gardens. Beautiful! And the first sign we see is:


Different flowers:






And a magpie:


After walking a little, you then reach the lagoon:






And it wouldn't be a proper lagoon without the wildlife:










Water lily:


And it really was this color:


And then we moved on. To a tree in a cage:

Apparently, it is very, very rare, and this species is 200 million years old.

Some four leaf clovers:


And some bamboo:


And then you arrive at the Japanese Gardens:


Which were overrun with Eastern Water Dragons!:


These guys were pretty cool, and there was a little girl there feeding them bread, until she started pegging one of them in the head and it ran away.







We then walked over to the bonsai house:




Then we saw a kookaburra:


And then up up up to the lookout, where you can see absolutely amazing views of the city:


After all that walking, we caught the bus back into the city center, where we hit up one of the only two Starbucks we have yet seen:


Some more walking was to be done, with no real goal, except maybe to cross the Victoria Bridge, to go to Southbank:


Eventually we decided we had enough walking for the day, and headed back to the bus stop, where we bumped into Simon (who lives in Lindsay's dorm). The three of us caught a bus to the Mt. Gravatt campus, and then we were planning on taking another bus from there to the Nathan campus. Only the next bus was close to an hour away. So we walked some more. About another 3 km back to Nathan campus. ^_^