After another glorious Greyhound bus journey, this time 16 hours (yay!) we arrived in Brisbane and although I’d been living there for a few months before I met up with Lucy, I thought it would be good to learn more about the city so we decided to take a free walking tour…

Honestly I can’t recommend these walking tours enough, obviously every one is different but it’s a great way to learn about a new city and a good way to get your bearings! After that we also decided to go to the Queensland Museum and check out the dinosaurs…

After checking out the dinosaurs we went upstairs where there was an exhibition full of native wildlife taxidermy, as a tourist it was good to see those animals but as an animal lover it made me sad to see them too, I had very mixed feelings about the exhibition.

There was also a ‘Discovery Centre’ upstairs in the museum that had taxidermy of snakes, spiders and insects, the centre also had a few live critters that you could see up close.
I was also super excited because I asked a member of staff there if she could identify a beetle that I found in Sydney and after showing her a video of it she said it was a Tectocoris diophthalmus commonly known as the Cotton Harlequin Bug – here is a photo of the one I saw in Sydney!

Now this is a warning for any arachnophobs out there – the next photo is of a spider BUT she is so cute! She is a Wolf Spider and she has the cutest face, she lives at the Science Museum and you can watch her being fed and making her nest, the staff there are so passionate about the animals there and I spoke to a woman for ages about this spider, they put a male in there for her to breed with but…she ate him! Never the less, I think she’s really cute!

The Queensland Museum is a really great place to visit, there is loads to do there, they also have ever changing exhibitions on there all the time. Another great day spent in the city and everything we did was FREE! Only cost us our bus fare into the city – honestly when you’re arriving in a new city seek out as much free stuff as you can, there is loads of stuff out there!