May 4 – The Australian Zoo

When we told friends of ours we were moving to Australia, one awesome family gave us the Wiggles Safari. The Wiggles go to The Australian Zoo in this video and hang out with Steve Irwin (it is an older movie) and his family. Lilly loves this video! So she was delighted to go somewhere she saw in the video. Needless to say we listened to a lot of Wiggles songs and Lilly spent the day looking for the Wiggles.

The day was rather dreary, a bit rainy and only slightly chilly. I'm not sure if this effected the crowds or not, but there definitely weren't very many people. This worked in our favor!

The first thing we went to do was sign up Lilly for a Turtle adventure – more on this later. We met a snake named Lily. Very big snake, I might add. And then we decided to get our picture with a Koala. It was a short experience and a little disappointing but we did get a nice picture from the park.

Next were the elephants. I was under the impression it was going to be a zoo keeper talk while they fed the animals. The zoo keeper did talk but WE got to feed the elephants!! They even asked us to take several pieces of food since the crowd was small, this way they could get all the feeding in without having to have an extra feed (aka so the zoo keepers didn't have to feed them). It was very cool. I tried to go up with Lilly but she was just fine and wasn't afraid of the elephants at all. She did drop her piece of food once and wanted to bend down to pick it up, apparently that was not the way to do it. The elephants just picked up the food out of our hands and stuffed it in their mouths. We fed them chunks of fruit and veggies (I remember extra-large pieces of carrots).

We went to a show in the Crocoseum. When they were doing the pre-show warm-up they went through different countries to see where people were from. They said the US and Emily and I gave a little holler. Then they asked for people from Australia and Lilly did a little jump up with her arm in the air. While it was cute, I realize she now associates herself more with Australia than with America. I was a little disappointed she didn't yell or anything.

The show had a lot about the park, a lot of info about Steve Irwin and his mission and what the park is doing to keep it going. They showed birds, snakes, and the crocodiles. No one wrestled a croc, I was slightly disappointed with that, but they did feed on some chicken and got him to come out of the water so we could see how big it was. Not something you want to run into on your holiday.

And then there was the kangaroo enclosure. Apparently you could buy kangaroo food somewhere, but I never saw where. The kangaroos and wallabies all expected food so they just hopped right up to us! Lilly was taking lots of pictures with her own camera and the animals would come right up in front of her face. She thought it was hysterical and that they were all very nice.

Lilly and I did the tortoise adventure thing. We got to go in with these giant turtles (Igloo and Galiath) and pet them. If you rub their chest, they would stand up and stick their heads out really far to get a rub all over.

Zoo Keeper: How old do you think these guys are?
Lilly: I don't know.
Zoo Keeper: Do you think they are older than your mom?
Lilly: Nothing can be older than my mom!

Awesome . . . the turtles were about 33 years old, so Lilly was partly right.

We caught up with one more elephant feeding. We were able to feed all three elephants many times! It was still just as neat as the first time. We just cruised around for a while and saw whatever we came across. We saw a wombat being walked like a dog, a tasmanian devil, some birds, tigers, and lizards. I think Emily was impressed with all the different animals and I was happy to have been to that zoo. I'm sure we'll go again!

We took a train to a different part of the park and since we were one of two families on the train the guys running the train came and talked to us while they were waiting for more people to board. They mentioned the pony rides and I just slapped my forehead. The last thing I wanted to do was pay a bunch of money for Lilly to walk around in a circle. But, as we got off, one of the guys mentioned it was free. I could do free, but what about waiting in line? I told Lilly we would check it out and see what it was but no promises! Well, wouldn't you know it, it really was our lucky day. It was free and there was no line. Lilly hopped right on a pony and the zoo keepers took her on a nice long ride through some trees. Apparently this is one of Bindi's projects. Another reason why Bindi is Lilly's favorite person in the world right now.

Before we headed back to our hotel we stopped in to see some friends. One of the teachers I worked with my first year lives with her husband and two adorable children on the Sunshine Coast. While they do a lot of traveling and working in the states and Fiji, it was very lucky that we all ended up in the same area at the same time!