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Thursday 15th March
Journal entry brought to you by (a meerkat-loving) Tami
Oh my goodness, Meerkats are SOOOO cute! Today we went to Taronga Zoo, which involved catching a ferry across the harbour – very fun.
Then we had to get a cable car up to the entrance of the zoo. The zoo was massive, and they had almost every animal you could think of (although sadly no dinosaurs or polar bears, both of which were requested by people before we went). There were, however, meerkats, giraffes, elephants, lions, cheetahs, tigers, snow leopards, lots of different turtles and snakes, spiders (we saw a female black widow, the red triangle is REALLY bright), emus, ostriches, gorillas, orang-utans, brown bears (so cute, although very dangerous apparently), kangaroos, koalas, wallabies, gibbons, dingos, foxes, and the list goes on. It was a lot of fun, although neither me or Sophie really agree with zoos, we didn’t before we went and that hasn’t changed but it does provide a good day out. The animals all seemed to be well looked after anyway, which is good. And many of them had been found injured and brought in to recover as they wouldn’t survive in the wild.
We had lunch (very pricey) at a café, and then went to watch the seal show, which was AWESOME, the seals were SO cute, and it was clear that their trainer loved them to pieces. They jumped, waved their flippers, one of them unwravelled a poster saying “Seal Show” or something which was soooo cute. Really worth watching. There was also this very cute display discussing litter dropping, and the effect this has on the sea and seal population. Then the guide dropped a piece of netting on the ground with a big tapered hole in the middle, which one of the seals flung around for a bit and then god their head stuck in to demonstrate how easily it could happen (meant to happen, part of the show). Then the trainer placed an empty plastic bottle on the floor, and another seal came over, picked it up with his mouth and deposited it in a box by the side of the pool. As the trainer rightfully said, If we can train a seal to do this, there is absolutely no excuse for humans not to learn to put their litter in the bin. Which was funny, but also so true. Why DO people just through junk to the ground? There are bins everywhere, it’s completely pointless, it endangers animals and makes the world look so untidy. It’s just stupid.
We then went to watch the free bird show, and this was also pretty cool, there was an owl who flew so close to me and Sophie that if we hadn’t ducked we would have got birded on. There was another bird who took money donations from the audience and put them in a box to help protect endangered and injured birds. At about ten to five, Sophie sensibly suggested that we head to the ferry port as there was a ferry at 5, and then at 5.30 but as the zoo closed at 5 we’d do better to get the first one. We were on our way but I got a little distracted by all the cute toy animals in the gift shops, so by the time we got to the cable car we only had about 7 minutes left (which to be honest we thought would be fine, as the ride up had taken about 2 minutes and went directly to the ferry port). HOWEVER. Of COURSE it wasn’t going to work like that this time, was it? The cable car took FOREVER to get down, it was moving so slowly. Then the ferry left two minutes early, so we had to wait for the next one. And we both got homesick. But then when we got back to the hostel we had a lot of fun creating dinner as the tin of Thai green curry that Sophie had so “cleverly” swiped from the free food shelf had actually solidified so our entire meal plan was thrown off course and we had rice and vegetables everywhere, so we had to mish it to a different shop to get some emergency curry sauce, was very fun. And I managed to, once again, completely over estimate how hungry we both were and cook about three times as much food as was necessary, but we had a titter while creating.
Sophie then had a fairly early night, and I watched Memento in the TV room and then went to bed in the early hours.
Hope you are all okay. Sorry the journal entries are not that interesting and that this one hasn’t been very long. I’m just a little tired, yawn, plus what more can I write about the zoo, you all know what the animals look like (teehee). Hope you’re all okay (-:
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