29 April 2009: Koalas and Dugongs

Today we fly to Sydney on the penultimate stage of our journey. This morning however there was enough time after breakfast to visit the Cairns Tropical Forest Zoo which sits within a huge dome on the top of Cairns Casino. The purpose of our visit was to cuddle a Koala and have our photo taken. The Koala on photo duty today was called “Harvey” and boy was he cute. On our way back to the hotel we stopped to observe the hundreds of fruit bats that hang out in the trees around the town. They are huge animals with cute brown faces and the wing span of a large bird (maybe a crow?). They chatter a lot to each other and during the night they fly about and feed on the fruit. During the day they hang out together at the top of the fruit trees –amazing sight.
We arrived in Sydney mid afternoon and were booked into the Hotel (Wynyard Travelodge) by 5.00 pm. We decided to visit the Sydney Aquarium as it is open until 10.00 pm and we guessed that it would probably be quiet in the evening –we were right. This aquarium is one of the best in the world and it certainly lived up to expectations. Just 3 months ago they received two Dugongs (Pig and Wuru) who are relatives of the manatees and are collectively known as “Sea Cows” as, in the wild, they graze on sea grass at the bottom of the sea. They are large, gentle creatures that are most closely related to the elephant (surprisingly). We fell in love with them instantly and spent half an hour viewing them alone. Pig and Wuru are the only Dugongs on exhibit in Australia and they were both orphaned at birth and taken to SeaWorld in Brisbane to be hand reared. In the wild a large percentage of them live off the North Australia coast and one of the reasons given for making the Great Barrier Reef a World Heritage Site was the fact that it is home to 12,000 of these beautiful sea giants. We also saw our first Platypus along with a host of unusual fish and mammals that we had never seen before. There was a huge reconstruction of the coral reef too which you could view through floor to ceiling glass windows and which was accompanied by classical music. It was truly beautiful.