I
was the first visitor of the day at the Lone Pine park, standing at the gate at
7:30 in the morning, "when the light is best", explaining to the
employee. And when it's not so darn sticky, I should have added. Soon I was
looking at a huge number of incredibly tired Koalas, hanging in strange ways in
the trees. 19 hours of sleep per day must be very stressful. Not far away the
occasional Emu grunted and the Kangaroos hopped by. After another round through
the park, the Koalas were exactly as active as before, only one of them shifted
position into something even more comfortable, in a way that a cartoon character
could not have done it better. In one of the smart books I read that a Koala
spends "19 hours resting or sleeping, 4.5 hours eating, and 30 minutes with
social activities, such as changing trees."
Around
noon I left the place as all animals were even more tired than in the morning
and this was unlikely to change before sunset, and I didn't want to spend all
day here after all. So I headed to the city instead, where I bought the
mandatory postcards and ate some good foods. Brisbane seems to be quite a
livable city, not too big and rather clean, but since I am after anything but
cities on this trip I left after only a few hours, heading south, away from
people again. I crossed some mountains on the way to the Lamington National
Park, where I found a full campground and a bug in the map - the road is a dead
end into the park, not a through road.
This
realization and the fact that it's about an hour's drive out made me pull into
the first bay into the super thick forest, just a couple of meters away from the
(only) road, where I successfully wrote all postcards and even read the first
section of Clarke's "Cradle"; I must say, Clarke's books are the best
SF literature, but please get rid of Gentry Lee, he makes things really slow and
boring, full of unnecessary social and technological detail which will be
ridiculous in a decade anyway (almost like Knight Rider's KITT talking to David:
"I have 32KB of RAM").