Saturday, September 18.
We woke up early to go to Starbucks before being picked up by our tour bus-
Croc Connections. I got myself a present and had their delicious banana nut bread. Great decision. Then we headed back to the hostel to be picked up. The guy that operated our bus was friends with Steve Irwin apparently. He was telling us some stories and a bit about the Zoo and the facilities on it. He told us that the Irwins-
Terri, Bindi, and Bob- live in a house in the middle of the zoo! On the way there he put on a Croc Hunter video. In it a ton of people who knew Steve were talking about him, and I wanted to cry. I almost did. Steve was a crazy guy, but he did a lot of really great things with his life.
When we got to the zoo, we immediately headed to the
Crocoseum for the big show! The Crocoseum is a main show area with waterways connecting to each of the crocodile enclosures. People told Steve that he wouldn't be able to get a crocodile to swim from its enclosure at the beginning of the show on command, and then back at the end. But he did!
<-I also saw this funny sign posted in the Crocoseum.
Terri, Bindi, and Bob were there and did the show!
During the show,
Bindi and the Jungle Girls sang some songs about saving the whales...and then Bob came out and performed with his jungle boys for the first time! After that, little Bob-bob sang the
Australian National Anthem!
Then Wes got Graham the croc to come out and Terri and Bindi fed him!
They also got him to do the
death roll, which is what a crocodile does when it latches onto its prey! Crocs wait by the waters edge for some unsuspecting animal to get too close, then they lunge out and grab them! They pull them underwater and try to drown them and they roll over and over to tear pieces off and kill them! Wes succeeded and we got to see Graham do a couple! On the end of the string is a big pig's leg.
Yum!
At one point in the show, Terri got Graham to jump out of the water like he would in the wild to get food from a tree branch.
They can just half of their body length out of the water.Also during the show they had a bird show. It was amazing! They trained all of these birds to fly free around the stadium to certain marks. At one point they picked four people out of the audience to get birds to the land them. Or so we thought.
I was really excited and practically jumping out of my seat to picked! But I wasn't and I was so disappointed. AND THEN I saw what they had to do. The guy told them that they had to make their best bird sounds and basically hump the air. He said that was the sign for the birds to land. So he let the birds out and the people started making fools of themselves and the birds just flew off! So it was all for nothing.
I think the goal was to make people look like idiots. They succeeded. This was the guy's first show. It was an audition for future shows.
After the show we went and explored the zoo. They had a lot of great photo ops.
This was by far the best zoo experience I have ever had. The croc show was free, AND they let people
feed the elephants for free! It was fantastic. The elephants trunk felt really weird. Alicia said, "I expected it to feel like an ear, but really it felt like a nose." Not much of a suprise considering it WAS a nose. I expected it to be really soft, but for something so sensitive, it was really tough and wrinkly and hairy. Honestly, I didn't like it. lol.
We saw echidnas, wombats, kangaroos, emus, fresh and salt water crocodiles, cassowaries, and I finally saw a tasmanian devil! He was a quick little bugger though! And then the highlight of the trip, for me anyways were the TIGERS!
We also saw a free tiger show! There were two females and one male. The handlers played with the females in and out of the water and showed us how a tiger could climb a tree. In the beginning, they used milk to bribe one of the female tigers to step into some nontoxic black paint and then onto an orange board. Then they sold the board with the tiger prints on it and the money went to charity. I really really wanted to buy it, but I knew I couldn't afford it. I did buy a
"Wildlife Warrior-Year of the Tiger" bracelet though. It was $5 and the money went to charity. Did you know that $5 can feed one tiger for one day in the wild? Personally, I don't know how they got that...tigers don't exactly pay for their food, but HEY! I didn't come up with it.
Seeing this performance reaffirmed my desire to work with tigers.
After checking out some of the animals, we went around and took pictures with Steve Irwin and us wrestling crocodiles! I sat inside of this fake giant croc's mouth and got my picture taken, and then after me this lady put her baby in there. It was so freaking cute! She was so tiny-she couldn't have been a month old. It was just adorable.
(Cue biological clock to start ticking.) Then we went and checked out the gift shops. I saw a piece of Australian opal for sale and it was $15,000!! Ridiculous. And weird that it was on sale at a zoo.
On the way back, the bus driver finish the movie we had started on the way there. My eyes teared up several times, but I never really cried. Thank god, I would have looked like an idiot.
That night we all decided to go to the
Pancake Manor to get dinner. We had to wait for a while to get seated (even though there were tons of seats open...curious.) so we went down to the bar where I heard
REAL AMERICAN MUSIC IN PUBLIC for the first time since being here. It was great. Thank you Eminem for rapping. I took a picture with a knight and then we went upstairs and got seated. The food was ridiculously delicious! But their bacon isn't really bacon. It's more like fried ham. Not crisp at all.
And later, while walking around that night we ran into a group of people dressed like
cave people!
After a long day, we went back to the hotel and went to bed early again. The next day we were going
Whale Watching!!
2. Kangaroo and joey
Then we left and and headed to a beach a few minutes away:
Then we went to the Koala Conservation Center on Phillip Island. They had a relatively large population of koalas and they would export koalas to the nearby French Island when there were too many for the Phillip Island park to sustain. They had plastic tubes around tree trunks and tree branches to keep koalas from eating there. Koalas are known for killing trees so in order to keep the area healthy they blocked parts of trees.
Next, We went to Seal Rocks and the Nobbies. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. The Nobbies were a few rocks sticking out of the ocean-nothing special, and Seal Rocks were really too far away from the shore to see the seals. They had binoculars that you could look through, but they were $2 and I didn't have any coins. Something I thought about when I saw Seal Rocks-GREAT WHITES! You know they are there, lurking under the water, waiting for a poor unsuspecting seal to go for a dip! No seals were eaten though...that would have been cool to see. lol.
The whole point of this trip was the Phillip Island Penguin Parade. Hundreds of fairy penguins cross the beach every night at dusk heading back to their burrows and bringing food back to their chicks. They wouldn't let us take pictures of them though. Apparently crossing the beach is super scary to them already and they don't want the flash of cameras to scare them further. They were so stinkin cute though!! They would all gather at the beach's edge in huge groups and wait for one brave guy to lead the way onto the beach. One would break off from the group and waddle a ways up the beach, and then turn back to see if anyone was following him. If so, he would continue...but if not, he would quickly turn around and run back to the group. You could see and hear the chicks calling to their parents so the parents could find their way back to their burrows. It was really amazing because they were able to recognize their young by call, and as a human you can still kind of hear the differences in the chick's voices.
