A wild time at Wildlife World.

So to continue the re-cap of Dawn's visit, i will briefly take you through Tuesday, when we headed off to Darling Harbour for a bit of an explore - and spent a very long time indeed lusting after sweets at the British Lolly Shop! Lots of sour stuff, yummm. We decided to head over for lunch at Baia, an Italian place we like, and of course feasted on garlic pizza, tomato and mozzarella salad, pastas and panini's...and a cappuccino to top it all off.

Jo and his mum at Darling Harbour

Then it was off to Wildlife World! Which claims to be Australia's number one tourist attraction. Err. Not sure about that, but we did have a good time checking out all the aussie wildlife on show. Here is a selection of what we saw...

A stick insect...which i poked, hoping for a reaction. Alas, did not get one.

Creepy crawly spiders. Jo loved to touch. *strokes spider*


Snakes! Ew. Australia, lucky country that we are, is home of the top three most venomous snakes in the world. These are the Fierce snake (or inland taipan), the Australian Brown snake and the Taipan.
I mean. In case you were headed off for a bushwalk and needed to know.

Some lizards, like the frilled lizard that Jo is making friends with here.

Koalas! Awww, some nice animals, finally. Here is a mother and her cub, who will reside in her pouch for about 8 months before moving out. Like most Australians, koalas are pretty darn lazy. They can sleep for up to 19 hours a day, and the rest of the time, they eat. And since all they eat is eucalyptus leaves, and we idiot humans keep chopping down their only source of food, they are becoming more and more scarce in the wild.

Kangaroos!

Real ones too, don't worry. There are over 40 species of kangaroos in Australia actually, but we saw red kangaroos and grey ones. The red kangaroo are the largest marsupials in the world - they weigh over 85 kgs and stand taller than a man. Y'all don't want to hit one of those with your car. For your cars sake. Kangaroos can't go backwards - which is why they feature on our coat of arms, to represent a county always moving forwards.

Kookaburras. These furry birds are cute! They usually live in the same area for life, and also mate for life. When they make noise, it sounds like laughter. Which is why they are also unfortunately known as the laughing jackass. Oh well.

Womabts. Don't ya love them? It's pretty rare to see them in the wild, since they only come out at night and are only found in certain parts of the country. During the day they hang out in their burrows - depending on the species, the burrows can turn into interconnecting labyrinth type things where whole communities of wombats will live. Minus David Bowie of course.

Annnd pretty butterflies :)

Nice picture Jo

It was a great day out, even though i did start feeling sick a little later and ended up in bed with a temperature...but we shall not speak of that. Gotta run, we're off to see Leah and Chris - Chris is cooking us dinner, so hopefully we survive. Coming up in part three of Dawn's visit - the Blue Mountains!