We could get close but not touch.

Kookaburra in a tree

Anzac bridge in Sydney

Tassie, I got to feed him Tasmanian devil pellets!

Famous Sydney opera house

Dead mouse dinner for owl, yummy

I didn’t know they were this big!

Today we finally got off the cruise ship after 14 days and disembarked in Sydney.   Sydney has about the same population as Melbourne but seemed much busier – perhaps it was because we were downtown and it looked like there was some sort of streetfair going on.

Our main activity today was to visit the Taronga Park Zoo (called the zoo with a view) where we saw a bird show which the volunteers in the zoo told us to see because it was “absolutely brilliant.”   It certainly was very nice and we were astounded to see black cockatoos with flashes of red in their tails.     We also saw several white ones sitting in trees around the zoo as well as quite a few kookaburras.

But the highlight of the day was our private tour (only 8 people, all of who were Americans) of the Australian part of the zoo where we truly went behind the glass and got to feed the animals and birds while the rest of the zoo’s visitors watched us do it.  Carol got to feed a Tassie devil and Jeff got to feed a ring tailed possum, which crawled all over him while she occasionally ate from a bowl of fruit that he held.  We also had a chance to take a whole lot of pictures with koalas and saw a platypus, another wombat, a rufous owl (who seemed to be very surprised to see us but enjoyed the dead mouse we brought him),  an echinda, a bilby, and a whole lot of other animals which seemed truly out of this world.  As we really like to see any kind of animal on our travels, this made for a truly excellent day.

We will likely not do a post tomorrow because we will fly all night from Australia to Honolulu and, because we will be crossing the International Date Line from west to east, we will arrive in Hawaii about 12 hours earlier than the time we left Australia.