When we woke up the next morning, we were hoping the weather would have cleared up before we drove back from the Blue Mountains. Unfortunately, it was still raining and miserable weather, so there was absolutely no chance of seeing the Blue Mountains before we left either. We went to the sports centre in the Blue Mountains so we could pay to have a hot shower. The thought of having cold showers in the rain are just not appealing to me right now! Once we'd freshened up, we set off and drove towards Featherdale Wildlife Park, which is on the way back, about 40 minutes away from Sydney. We were debating whether to go to Taronga Zoo or Featherdale, someone from back home recommended Featherdale to me because they say it's an animal rescue place and you get a hands on experience with the animals. When I looked up prices, Featherdale was half the price of Taronga, so this was a contributing factor as to why we decided to go there instead of Sydney Zoo. Originally I did want to go to Australia Zoo, which is the one where Steve Irwin was based, but it was an hour drive north of Brisbane and we weren't heading north, so we settled for Featherdale.

Wallabies

It took us about an hour and a half to drive there from the Blue Mountains, it wasn't raining here, but the sky was still a bit grey. We went inside and were greeted by loads of little wallabies, which look exactly like kangaroos, only smaller. They were free to roam around the zoo and there were quite a few of them scattered all over the place. They weren't too shy either, as when we approached them, they didn't run away. They were so cute though I could have picked one up to cuddle it. Then some colourful birds of paradise were also running around freely, there was a male and a female. You could tell which one the male was, as he was running around doing a mating dance, which was hilarious to watch, as the female didn't want to know! They were really colourful red and yellow birds, with long feathers as a tail. I don't know if they could fly or not, but if they could, i'm sure they wouldn't be just allowed to roam about. There were lots of other cockatil and love birds all caged up. Some of them could talk and were saying hello, and there was a really friendly black cockatoo that kept following John around inside it's cage. We then passed some wombats, but they were just sleeping so we moved on. There was a cassowary bird, which was huge and it had a funny coloured thing, which looked like a crown, it was cute in an ugly kind of way. Down by the river, there were lots of ducks and birds in the water, including some big Australian pelicans. They looked a lot different to their cousins we sew back in Peru.

Koalas

We came to some more native Australian animals, the marsupials; koalas and kangaroos. We saw the koalas first, they really are as cute as they look, but they don't do much, as they sleep for up to 18 hours a day. They have quite a lot of koalas here, and they are just free to move about the trees inside the park. They also have one of the biggest successful breeding populations in any zoo. Most of them were clinging to trees, asleep, and some of them were eating the eucalyptus leaves. I wish I could have got a video of them, but as the little camera is broken, we can't take any. I didn't know a koala was a marsupial as it's called a koala bear, but it's a marsupial because it's young are born and live in their pouch until they are old enough to fend for themselves. This zoo allows you to cuddle a koala, although you're not allowed to hold them as it's illegal. Apparently 1 in 10 people in another well know zoo get bitten holding koalas. The koalas are mostly clinging to a tree branch, so you're allowed to stand next to them and stroke them on the back, not the head, as they don't like this and can bite you. So of course I wanted to get in and stroke the cute koala, it was asleep and facing towards the camera so we got in there next to it to pose for our picture.

Kangaroos

After the koala encounter, we wandered through to see the kangaroos all hopping about over the place. You can feed them here and buy food for a dollar, the money helps towards supplying food for the animals. We got an ice cream cone each, it was filled with some type of grassy thing, must be a treat for them. When we walked through, the kangaroos all started coming up to us when we held out the food. Although, when I tried to feed the kangaroos, a big emu bird was coming up to me trying to steal the food with its big beak! I thought it would bite me as it kept following me around while I had the food in my hand. Needless to say, the food didn't last long and was gone as the emu stole it from the kangaroos too. I noticed that the kangaroos we saw in the wild were a lot more muscular and defined, whereas the ones here were on the larger side, probably because they're getting fed all of the time. I guess there are quite a few different species of kangaroos. At least we got to see some in the wild and some here too.

Tasmanian devils

Everyday they feed certain animals at certain times of the day, while we were here, they were feeding dingos, which are like dogs, and also the Tasmanian devils. I haven't seen a Tasmanian devil before, so we said we'd watch the keepers feed them. These little devils are supposed to have one of the strongest jaws and are able to crunch through bone like its soft. Before it got given it's food, it kept running around it's enclosure non-stop. We had a wander around looking at some other animals before the feeding. We saw a huge crocodile, lots of birds, farm animals and some echidnas, which are like a cross between hedgehogs and porcupines. We saw another wombat, this time it was wide awake and moving around very slowly it looked like a pig to me. We came back in time for the feeding session, they gave the devil some bone to eat. Apparently it's eye sight isn't good, so it smells the food to track it down. When it was thrown in and the devil found it, you could hear it crunching on the bone really loudly. We also saw another devil which had been given a whole deer leg bone and it was grinding that down no problem. It was fascinating to watch them. They do have red on the back of their ears and look like little devils too.

We left to walk around the rest of the park and walked around the reptile house and saw lots of snakes, lizards and frogs. One frog didn't look like it was real. It looked like it was plastic, but it was real, as in our last night camping, I saw one down the ladies toilets, lurking there in the dark! We also got to see a bearded dragon, which reminded me of the tuatara in New Zealand. Walking further around the park, there were also sone gull type birds, they were also just on the floor not flying about which was strange, as surely they would fly away if they weren't in a cage. Before we left, we couldn't resist going back for another cuddle with a koala. This time, there was one awake, so we stood next to it and stroked it, and took more pictures of it. We never got to see any wild koalas, but at least we're getting to see them here, I would love to have seen a baby in a mothers pouch, but we did get to see joey kangaroos in the mothers pouch, so that will have to do. I also got to hold a bird like a kookaburra, it was so fluffy and cute. When we went out to the main car park, there was a guy holding a baby quokka, which is another marsupial like a kangaroo. It was all wrapped up in a blanket, it's a lot smaller than the wallabies and kangaroos. It's a really hands on zoo, i've really enjoyed my time here. We're glad to have had a hands on experience with some native Australian animals.

A real life Wolf Creek experience!

We left the wildlife park and drove back to Sydney, where we were greeted to yet more rain. We leave tomorrow to drive back to Brisbane. It's an 11 hour drive straight, but we're going to do the drive spread over 2days. The next morning, we got up and it's maradi gras party here in Sydney, but they still have rain, so it won't be much fun in that parade. We had our breakfast and left to head back towards Brisbane. We drove for about 5 hours and John was getting tired of driving, so we decided to stay overnight in Woolgoolga, where we stayed before on our way to Brisbane. We got there in time to cook up dinner. This place has a sheltered area where we can cook up dinner. We sat there and cooked our dinner, while John was in the loo, some guy came over and sat on our table. He introduced himself as Derek, he was an aboriginal man. At first I thought I saw him drinking a can of sprite, but then I saw he was pouring vodka into the can. He was really drunk and we both felt a bit uneasy around him. He started chatting about Wolf Creek, and kept going on about it, as we just saw that the other day, we thought what if he's like Mick. He then proceeded to tell us he's been stabbed 6 times, he's stabbed people, and he's been in prison.

As we were cooking up dinner, we couldn't just get up and leave, we're stuck. I really felt uncomfortable around him now and he kept moving closer towards me. He was showing us videos from some girl flights, which I wasn't interested to see, but didn't want to get on the wrong side of him, so we just kept letting him to chat crap to us. It was getting dark and people around the park were slowly disappearing. I didn't want us to be the only ones left here with him. After we finished dinner, we said we're driving back to Sydney. We were suppose to stay here, but couldn't risk it now, or we might be the next targets from Wolf Creek! We made a quick getaway, but it was a close call as he followed us to our car. We thought he was going to ask us for a lift, but luckily, he went off shouting to someone else. I was glad to get out of that place and we carried on driving until we found somewhere else safe to camp for the night.

Goodbye Australia

The next morning, we carried on driving back to Brisbane. We stopped in a retail park near to the city and stopped in an electrical shop. We looked in there and saw some cameras, in particular, compact ones. As we've only got the dslr, we wanted to buy a little compact as our other one broke. Our insurance have paid out some money for the laptop and lenses that got stolen, so we figured we'd buy a new camera if we found one we liked cheap enough. Luckily, we found one we liked, so bought that one to take to Asia with us. I wouldn't have felt comfortable taking a dslr around the big cities in Asia. We went back to Brisbane afterwards and found a camp place new the airport. We had to pack up all our stuff and tidy up the hire car. We have to get up early tomorrow to take the car back to the rental company then we fly to Singapore tomorrow morning. Next stop Asia and just over 4 months left of our trip, time has gone so quickly so far.