I finally saw kangaroos!! =D

Yesterday I went to the Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary with my friends Soo Se and Laura and we saw kangaroos, koalas, dingoes, wallabies, snakes, birds, platypuses (platypi?), giant lizards and lots of other animals. It was so much fun!! We woke up super early and caught the tram downtown, then took a train one hour outside of the city to Healesville, which is in the Yarra Valley wine region. :) We thought since it was so far that it was going to cost a lot to get out there so we planned to go to the animal sanctuary in the morning and then go wine-tasting afterwards. As it turned out, the end of the train line (Lilydale) is still in Zone 2, and so is the bus route that took us from the Lilydale train station, past several wineries, to the animal sanctuary; that means we each only had to pay $4.80 to get all the way out there! We decided we're going to go back to Healesville sometime this weekend for a day devoted to wine-tasting, which allowed us to stay at the animal sanctuary longer than we had planned. The Healesville Sanctuary seems to be a very nice place for the animals who live there. The property is huge so all the animals have lots of space to roam and everyone who works there clearly loves animals and knows a lot about them. Next to the dingo habitat, they had pictures of each of their dingoes (including one who recently passed away) and little bios about each one, describing their personality and listing their best friend in the den ("den friend"), the way their howl sounds, etc. I almost cried when I read that one dingo named Opal "is coping well since the recent loss of her life-long den friend Harry." :( The staff at Healesville encourages visitors to make simple changes such as switching to toilet paper made from recycled paper to reduce the amount of trees that are cut down since those are homes to birds and other animals. We watched a bird show that featured lots of cool birds of prey and colorful parrots. The birds flew over the crowd and did tricks. Rachel, I could totally see you working there someday. :) We got to get pretty close to all the animals, especially the kangaroos and koalas, and they were adorable!! I decided not to pay the extra $10 for a "Magic Moments" close encounter with the dingoes, even though the girl at the ticket booth told me when she went into the dingo enclosure, a dingo licked her arm. It was a difficult decision but ultimately my need to save money won out over my desire to be licked by a dingo. I am regretting it already. After about four hours at the sanctuary, we started to head back into the town of Healesville for lunch and then a little wine-tasting. We had just missed the bus and the next one wasn't coming for almost an hour so we decided to hitchhike into town. I asked one girl who was just leaving the sanctuary if she could give us a lift but she was following someone else and didn't know the area well enough so she couldn't take us (but she was very nice) so we went out to the road and I stuck my thumb out. About ten cars passed and gave us a thumbs-up but no one stopped. Finally a man pulled over ... he was one of the tour guides at the sanctuary! What a score! He drove us into town and dropped us off at the Cole's grocery store, which was only about a 5-minute walk from the Giant Steps Winery. :D We got some food and then spent about an hour tasting wine (for free!!) at Giant Steps. They had really good wine under three labels: Giant Steps, Innocent Bystander, and Mule. We left at around 4:15 to try to catch a bus to another winery before they closed but it was going to be a while so we tried to hitchhike again. Only a few cars passed us (lots of thumbs up and one middle finger up haha) before a lovely hippie woman picked us up and asked where we were going. We said we wanted to go to Boat O' Craigo Winery (we had passed it on the way in and were intrigued by the name) and she said, "I would take you there but they're not open on Thursdays!" haha whoops :/ We had a winery map with business hours on it but apparently we hadn't read it very carefully. It was already close to 4:30 and we didn't have a backup plan so we just let her drop us off about 20 yards past where she had picked us up and we went back into Giant Steps and tasted (and re-tasted) the rest of their list. It was pretty funny. :D We're going to do an all-day wine-tasting trip either tomorrow or Sunday, so hopefully we can check out Boat O' Craigo the second time around. By the way, Soo Se is an old friend from SLO and Laura is a new friend, also from SLO! She's here visiting Soo Se, who just moved to Melbourne and will be working and traveling in Australia for the next year! We met up at the Verdasco/Berdych match together last week and have watched lots of tennis on TV since then. This morning we went to a (free) circuit training class at a gym downtown. Right now I'm staying with them at an apartment they're renting in a part of the city called Brunswick East. It's only about a 15-20 minute tram ride from the center of town. Last week I was staying with my cousin RIchard's friend in Clifton Hill but on Tuesday he had friends coming to stay from out of town so I got the boot. I sent couch requests to several couchsurfers but no one could host me. Fortunately Soo Se and Laura offered to let me stay that night ... and then the next night ... and the next night. They said I can stay until I find another place, and if I don't find another place I can stay until I leave for Sydney next week. :) Okay here are the animal pics you've all been waiting for, plus a few others from the past week:

I love this dingo!

black-breasted buzzard (they use rocks to crack open emu eggs ~ this guy was about to demonstrate on a stunt egg as part of the bird show)

flying fox

wallaby

giant monitors

kissing kangaroos :)

kangaroo scratching his arm

I love this cool guy!!

koala

koala scratching his bum

koala sleeping

koala on my head :)

CRAPMAN! ~ Healesville Sanctuary's superhero

sometimes I have to take all my bags on the tram; 

when this happens, I'm a nuisance :/

me, Soo Se and Laura at the tennis, 

watching some awesome matches in Garden Square

beautiful Verdasco :)