4517 A sleeping wombat can finally be seen at a good angle.
4527 You can never know too many koalas.
4543 The cute, but not so cuddly echidna.
4557 The red-necked kangaroo with joey is on the left.
Nov 12 - Sydney, Australia. Today we are headed out of Sydney into the surrounding hills to the Koala Park. The trip will be by bus one way and by the Rivercat Ferry the other. Sydney, like all other cities of any size, has traffic problems during the morning and afternoon commute hours. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to Singapore but this morning it’s delayed our bus so they’ve commandeered one of the shuttle busses to get us going.
The drive out of town was smooth, just like most other places the traffic is headed in. We arrived at Koala Park and headed directly to the Koala enclosure. While you cannot hold the koalas here in New South Wales, you can pet them if they’re standing on the rail or nearby. A pretty large one was dozing on the fence and Diana wasted no time in giving it a pat or two. It didn’t even stir from its doze in response, totally unconcerned about the human activity around it.
They have an enclosure of Little Penguins (That’s their actual name, not a description), aka Eudyptula minor. They average about a foot tall and weigh in at a little over 2 pounds. They are, as their name suggests, the smallest species of penguin and the only one to breed in Australia.
Another connection between Texas and Australia is that they both have red-necks. Australia has the regular Texas species but also has the red-necked kangaroo. There’s a small mob of them in a large enclosure. One momma had a joey in her pouch that stuck it’s head out for a brief photo opp. For some reason they seem to prefer being upside down with rear legs and tail sticking out. Probably that’s because the milk source is inside the pouch.
As usual the wombat was sleeping inside his log. What was not usual was that the sun was right to get a good view on him plus he was sleeping in a position that allowed you to get a good view of his face. Nice photo opp as well.
The echidnas were out moving around. These little porcupines like animals look very cute but are not exactly cuddly. The swamp wallabies were out hopping around.
Koala Park is a very low key nice place to look around.
Soon our time was up and it was time to get on the bus to head to the ferry for our trip back into Sydney on the Parramatta River. We were a little early for the ferry so our guide had the driver divert for a tour through the Olympic site. They use it for fairs, concerts and sporting events so it’s in great shape. There’s a McDonald’s on the site as well as a nice hotel.
The Rivercat is a sleek, high speed catamaran that has two versions. An express model, that looks to be a little larger and has no on deck seating, and a local version that has open seating in the aft section but is still very aerodynamic in shape. We are riding the local version and I immediately moved to the rear deck to be outside. It was great!! The sun was out but it was cool. When he got up to speed between stations that were a little farther apart it was really fun. Some stations were very close together but on opposite sides of the river. Lots of people boarded the boat just to go across.
Sydney and the greater metro area have a lot of waterfront housing, everything from large homes on fair plots of land to condos and apartments. The rivers and bays are lined with housing in the areas where it is not used for parks and gardens. There are lots of those for sure.
Our tour was supposed to end at Circular Quay but Diana and I decided to get off at the Darling Harbour stop and look around there before walking back to the ship. Our intention was to go to the aquarium in the harbor but when we saw that it was $36A each to enter and we only had an hour before we had to start back to the ship we decided to split a sandwich and look in the shops instead.
It was a pleasant day and the walk back to the ship was right along the harbor all the way.
Our entertainer was Ash Puriri a large Maori man from New Zealand that has a lounge type performance. His voice was nice and he sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow ‘Iz’ style. That was nice. He had too much ‘lounge’ shtick in his show but it was still enjoyable.
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