Today we went to Currumbin wildlife sanctuary. We got to hold a cute koala!

We found a stick insect, and it started running up my dad’s pant leg!

  “It feels like a Dungeness crab.” Dad, quoting Patrick F. McManus as the insect raced for his vitals.

There was a crocodile feeding show, but it was difficult to take a good picture.  These other crocodiles were making a scary, growling sound when they breathed.

Never smile at a crocodile!

 

I can’t seem to stop taking pictures of the ibis, Australian brush turkeys, and water dragons.  This probably is like a tourist coming to Woodinville and taking pictures of squirrels.  If my American Pacific Northwest accent doesn’t give me away, then me taking all of these pictures will.  I don’t care though.  These animals are so cool!  I’m going to post a few pictures of these “everyday” animals. 

Ibis

Ibis with Australian water dragons

Eastern water dragon

Eastern water dragon

Gippsland water dragon

 

 

Australian Brush Turkey

After a sheep shearing show, the song “Down Under” by Men at Work was played!  On the airplane ride over here, I was hoping to hear this song at some point in Australia!  I was so excited about it.

We started howling at some dingoes and to our surprise, one howled back!  We howled back and forth with one for a few minutes.  I wonder what our conversation was about.  Hopefully we weren’t insulting the dingo’s family or saying something offensive in its dingo language!

Interestingly, dingoes are competitors against tigers for food.

There was a kangaroo hangout going on here with one lonely emu

Here are some various animals that I took pictures of:

Tasmanian devil

Koala

Sleepy kangaroos

Wombat

After visiting Currumbin wildlife sanctuary, we got some ice cream.  I ate lychee frozen yogurt and hokey pokey ice cream for the first time.  Hokey pokey ice cream tastes like creamy caramel and vanilla with some crunchy pieces.  It was some of the best ice cream I’ve ever had.  The taste of lychee is really difficult to describe.

Later, we went on a night hike with Mr. and Mrs. Whyte as our guides.  Jokingly, my dad modified the rhyme that teaches the differences between poisonous versus harmless snakes: “Red and black, get the heck back. Red and yellow, kill a fellow. All other snakes, you’ll die anyway.”  Basically, everything here is either poisonous, or it makes you high.  Seriously, there is this toad that if a dog licks it, the dog will get high.  This could just be Mr. Whyte pulling our leg though.  We learned to keep an eye out for Mr. Whyte.  He liked to work us up with scary stories about dangerous critters and then hide to scare us.  The first time he did this I thought there was a poisonous snake in the bushes when it shook.  I jumped back and was ready to run.  We didn’t see any snakes, but we did see big toads and spiders.  I kept my eyes on the spiders the whole time.