Cleland Wildlife Park - Australia

Subash and I are in Australia! We spent the first week in Adelaide and now moved on to Melbourne. We will be traveling around here and New Zealand for the last of our trip.

Australia has been fun so far. The money is waterproof and everyone wears flip-flops.

Between South Africa and Australia I am getting spoiled by amazing animals. Australia, of course, has it's own unique set of creatures that have evolved separately from those on other continents, namely marsupials. Marsupials here are in the family "Macropodidae," meaning "large foot." 

It is worth looking up the "Australian megafauna," as there were a lot of crazy giant marsupials living here that went extinct in the last ~100,000 years, including a marsupial lion, carnivorous kangaroo, and a kangaroo that was 10 feet tall.

Outside Adelaide is the Cleland Wildlife Park, which is itself inside a large conservation area. The park is basically a free range zoo, where the animals are kept in large open enclosures, and you can generally walk around them at your leisure. 

Our first attempt at getting to the park wasn't so great, and a good example of When Traveling Fails. There haven't been too many of these on our trip, but they do happen.

I used google maps to help plan the proper bus route to get to Cleland, which is about 40 / 50 minutes outside the city. We were already frustrated that day, for reasons I can't remember anymore, and took a couple wrong buses within the city and then waited for a while for the next "right" one to come along. It was a chilly day, and as the bus climbed up the surrounding hills got colder and rainier, which neither of us was prepared for.

We got off the bus where Google indicated, along with a single old woman, in the middle of nowhere. The bus pulled away before we realized just how empty it was. A sign that I thought might be for the park was actually for one of the entrances to the giant conservation area around it.

We chased down the old lady to ask which way to the wildlife park and were told that we were nowhere near it, and then it started to rain.

There was nothing else to do but wait for a return bus. There were no time tables posted and the phone number on the bus sign wouldn't go through. The rain and wind came harder. 

We huddled inside the small tin lean-to at the bus stop for over an hour before another bus came by in either direction. Defeated, we took it back to the city and went home.

It was a miserable day, except for the parts where it got SO miserable that it became funny.

I did some more research on the REAL bus and we tried again the next day.

We took two buses and a shuttle, and finally made it to the Cleland Wildlife Park. They sell little bags of animal food for $3, which you can actually hand feed to the kangaroos and bandicoots. We stepped through the gate and bam! Australian animals!

I approached the first kangaroo very slowly, stopping about 5 feet away with my hand out holding some food. I was so afraid of scaring them, and of their powerful legs / giant claws. It turned out they are so used to being fed, though, that they don't even bother to get up and come to you! You have to bring it right up to their mouths.

Their mouths were very soft and fuzzy!

They have a number of different kinds of kangaroos in the park separated by different fences and gates you can walk through. Some had little joeys! They were amazing to see up close. I knew they used their tail somewhat when moving, but never realized that they actually put their weight on it like another leg when walking around. Their tails are so muscular to support the body weight and help keep their balance. Apparently this is called "pentapedal locomotion." 

Their hind feet were also like nothing I've ever imagined. It looked like three toes, with the center one highly elongated. I looked it up and it turns out the first toe is generally missing, the second and third toe are fused, the fifth is small, and so it is the fourth that is the long powerful one.

And their front paws like little hands.

I can't believe I was able to get this close to them! No zoom required.

All throughout the park were also little potoroos, an animal I had never heard of before. 

In the animal-feeding zones there were also emu!

They looked so much like raptor dinosaurs, it was slightly spooky to watch them walk around. I wouldn't want to get kicked by those feet, and feeding them was a little scary.

The park also had Tasmanian devils,

wombats, wallabies, bandicoots, monitor lizards, as well as a huge number of birds, including the biggest pelican I have ever seen.

There were also dingoes, which were so cool! They are a beautiful orange color. We happened to be there at their feeding time, and got to watch this young woman with possibly the coolest job ever feed them raw chicken.

Last but not least, in a separate area, fenced off from people, were koalas!

They have two opposable "thumbs" instead of one, and also have fingerprints.

I was reading about them afterwards and they have almost comically tiny brains. It has one of the smallest brains in proportion to its size of any mammal, and it only takes up 60% of the actual skull space. The rest is just fluid! Possibly it's tiny brain is due to its extremely specified diet of mostly eucalyptus leaves, which aren't really that nutritious and are also toxic. Bonus fact for your next dinner party: koalas can get chlamydia, and the unfortunately acronymed KIDS, Koala Immune Deficiancy Syndrome, similar to AIDS in humans. 

Can you imagine being one of the first foreign people to come to Australia and see all of these animals??? It must have blown their minds, they must have thought they were dreaming.

We had a great time at Cleland. Going in to it I was a little nervous about the fact that you could feed some of the animals---I wanted to do it, but I didn't want to support something that was harmful or taking advantage of them. In the end, though, I think the park has a good handle on this. You are not allowed to get close to some of the more uncommon and rare animals like the Tasmanian devils and dingoes, and they are careful about how much their animals are close to people and their stress levels, including limiting some if the day is too hot.

It was wonderful to see the kangaroos close up!! I do hope to see some in the actual wild, but I loved being able to get right next to them and see their various features.

How strange to feed a kangaroo!

I can't wait to see what else Australia will bring.