Jeff’s new friend

 

A wombat!

Koala

A devil looking for trouble.

Check out the baby “Joey” in the pouch, head hanging out eating grass.

Scratching between front legs!

We spent the entire day in Tasmania today and WOW!  A dream come true seeing the Devils (they locals pronounced it “deevils”), feeding kangaroos and scratching them between their two front legs (if you scratch their heads it means “go away”), wombats!, koalas and all sorts of strange critters at the wildlife preserve.  Now as far as these deevils go, they are so grumpy there cannot be two of them within 5 feet or there is a terrible sounding disagreement!  They like to eat dead stuff but the guide told us to keep our hands out of the enclosure or they would take off a finger, despite the fact that “they are lovely” — debateable to be sure!  They are fascinating.  The video I tried to take didn’t turn out but you can YouTube them and see the same thing we saw today,  them fighting over a piece of dead meat and carrying on like banshees. I was surprised to see Hobart, Tasmania was such a big city.  It is part of Australia, and it is the capital of this island sort of like Honolulu is the capital of Hawaii yet it belongs to USA.  There are no panhandlers or homeless to be seen.  It is clean and kept up.  No one is rude and aggressive drivers must all be in the US because we saw none here.  People here are friendly to Americans and eager to be helpful. We did stop off in a small historical town called Richmond and walked around and shopped a little.  Saw the old jail called “Gaol” from olden times.  Saw a man walking a border collie and asked him if it was a sheep dog and he said “Naw, he never saw a sheep in his life!”  ha ha Tomorrow we sail all day for Melbourne.  You classrooms watching our blog look up these places on the map and see how close to Antarctica we are.  See if you can find Tasmania.