Taronga Zoo

In one final awesome outing before we left Sydney, Alex & I spent Tuesday at the Taronga Zoo.  The Zoo is across the bay from Sydney with beautiful views of the city and a lot of animals you don’t see at the Zoo back home.  We got there just before lunch and started at the bottom of the Zoo slowing working our way to the exhibits at the top of the hill.  We immediately noticed the numerous creepy spiders looming overhead and I was very cautious about walking too close to the edge of the paths from then on.  We were able to walk into the kangaroo enclosure and check them out up close with no fence in between us, which was really cool.  The koalas and red pandas were really cute too, though we weren’t able to climb in with them.  They had snow leopards, tahrs, wallabies, pandas, zebras and kangaroos plus your regular zoo fare elephants, giraffes, and tigers in addition lots of other animals and reptiles that kept us busy all afternoon.

Love was in the air at the Zoo and we got an eyeful on several occasions.  When we were watching the chimps, the alpha male with a giant red rocket went after one of the females but she was already getting some action from a different guy and, when she rejected him, he proceeded to chase her all around their enclosure with a big stick – much to the amusement of Alex and all the children watching.  I’ll spare you his commentary on this because it’s ridiculous but seriously this is people watch the Nature Channel, it was entertaining!  The crocodiles shared an equally amorous encounter right next to the glass, leaving me wondering how they felt about an audience taking photos while they were getting down to business (yes, I took a photo too…).  Fortunately for the girl croc, it was a relatively quick encounter then she sunk back under the water away from all the attention. 

I got a new Ipod Nano the day before (b/c mine, which was relatively new, stopped holding a charge pretty much as soon as we got here) and it came with the Nike Fitness application that can track how many steps you take, how far you’ve gone and how many calories you’ve burned just by you wearing it.  It was cool (I wish we’d had that when we were in Katoomba) and, between walking to and from the ferry plus wandering around the Zoo all day, we walked another eight miles that day. 

Tonight we’re headed back to The Rocks area of Sydney for one last dinner before we head out tomorrow…  But first, here's a bonus photo of me and a giant stuffed koala at the Zoo!