How can you not love these faces? This weekend we had the most amazing animal encounter experience. On the way to the Great Ocean Road, we stopped off in The Otways to experience the The Otway Fly - a treetop walk through the rainforest. Then, we stayed at the most amazing place. It is called Fauna Australia, and is a small, family-run wildlife park. You can only have access to see the animals if you are a guest at the property. You can hand-feed the animals - wombats and wallabies and other marsupials in the kangaroo/wallaby family. They have over 400 animals there. The owner also took us in to see the koalas up close. You can pet and feed them too. They are the cutest things ever! This photo is of a mama and baby having their dinner. Koalas need to eat one kilogram (more than 2 pounds) of eucalyptus each day. That's a lot of leaves. They don't drink water, and they aren't always as stoned as they appear to be. It's just that they relax in the trees to conserve energy - and they sleep up to 20 hours per day. They have no natural predators in the wild, but because they eat so much eucalypt, they often run out of food and die (or are culled) in the wild. But these girls were happy and doing just fine.
Later, along the Great Ocean Road, we were surprised to see a koala bounding down the side of the road - they can move fast when they want to.
I wanted to take one home with me, but I don't have any eucalyptus trees in my back yard - oh well.
And, here's a photo of the friendliest wallaby ever!
