Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

The Otways with Grandma, 2-3 October, 2010 part 2

Fauna Australia Wildlife Retreat

We stayed Saturday night at the Fauna Australia Wildlife Retreat. It's a wildlife park that is only open to people who stay there overnight. The lovely thing about this is that many of the animals are nocturnal, so you can go around at any time of day or night that suits you and see what they're up to. Spend a quiet day doing other things, such as having dinner at the Otway Junction Motor Inn in Lavers Hill four minutes down the road, then check out the activity at dusk (for the crepusculars like the kangaroos and wallabies) or after sunset (for the nocturnals). They give you a bag of carrots to feed to the wombats and macropods, which is figured into the animal's diet. So we had fun wandering around looking closely at a lot of animals. No photos of the after-dark ones, of course. But plenty of those around in daylight. There was some conflict with one little girl though, who was a little perturbed that we were giving the carrots to someone *else*. So she got to have one of the carrots while Mummy, Daddy and Grandma fed the animals with the rest. The wallabies asked her to share, and she was a little unwilling. But when we were in the pen with them (it's an open pen where the humans are in the cage and the animals can come in to look at us if they wish!) some of the wallabies did manage to steal her carrot in a beautifully cooperative manner. There's a joey in one of their pouches. The young girl who sat with us at one point is a... Wildlife Warrior? Some program from Australia Zoo with Bindi Irwin, anyway, where they learn to be better ambassadors for wildlife. When she was telling us about it I could almost see the cogs turning in Sparrow's head. I could see her doing something like that later -grin-.

Heading home - lunch at Ferguson, and the Colac Botanic Gardens

After walking at Triplet Falls we stopped for lunch at the store in Ferguson. It's a lovely mishmash of interesting stuff - plenty of alternative food tucked into lovely wooden shelves, in an old building that also hosts a local museum full of random things. Like a huge bottle top collection. Sparrow liked playing with the bottle lids they had out on the checkerboards, but even more liked our toasted sandwiches (which really were quite good) and the chai latte.

We next broke the journey at Colac in the Botanic Gardens. I hadn't seen those before so that was nice. We had a lovely walk, though Sparrow got confused at the beginning when Daddy and Mummy walked in different directions - she just didn't know who to follow. So she insisted on sitting on a bench and not going anywhere til Daddy came back. It was a lovely walk, and Sparrow fell asleep in the car quite happily afterwards (though she didn't stay asleep for quite the whole journey).