Animal Day!

So far in my few days in Australia, I've been having a blast but other than the birds I've been blogging about (which, admittedly, have been pretty cool), I haven't seen any Australian animals, certainly no mammals - which is a bit odd since I'm so used to seeing squirrels everywhere in Seattle.

But that changed today, at least a little, because we had an exchange student trip to Caversham Wildlife Park, which was about 45 minutes outside Perth and has about every big or medium-sized Australian animal you can think of except some of the reptiles.

Our first hour at the park we had a guided tour that started out with a trip to the kangaroo enclosure where we could hand feed and pet about 70 kangaroos - reds, western greys, and some special white kangaroos they had. Certainly a different animal philosophy than what I'm used to but cool nonetheless. From there we saw a whole bunch of different animals - quokkas (cat-sized kangaroos), black swans (the iconic animal of Western Australia), dingos, echidnas, quolls, emus, cockatoos, barking owls (yes, barking - they sounded like a dog), Tasmanian devils, even a baby crocodile. We also had a photo op with a wombat named Big Bups (Australian for big baby) and a koala, where I partially got over my fear of the evil gremlin-looking creatures and got close enough to give it a small stroke on the back (which was all the touching we were allowed.

After the tour we saw the park's Aussie Farm Show, where we were introduced to sheep herding (with Australian kelpies or sheepdogs) and sheep shearing technique, the art of whip cracking, and afterwards we all got a turn at milking a cow, which I did for the first time in my life and actually found it a lot easier than I'd always assumed it would be.

We got a little more time to look around the park and then were treated to a barbecue lunch by a company that was promoting outdoor excursion tours in Western Australia (some of them look pretty cool, I may look into doing one of them). Part of their presentation was an introduction to vegemite. As I already know I like vegemite pretty well, I volunteered Sindre to take part in the vegemite sandwich eating competition. He did well but I don't think he came away a fan.

Back to campus and dinner. in a few minutes we have another Currie Hall orientation activity, a coffee crawl (like the family friendly version of a pub crawl, I guess) which should be a good time. More orientation activities tomorrow.