Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and happy New Year to everyone. Thank you so much to people who sent us Christmas presents all the way to the bottom of the world - we had a fantastic Christmas Eve with lots of love, presents and chocolate.

Sorry we haven't written in so long - I've been away and Leslie has been up to his eyeballs in team photos. He photographed a bunch of kids' sports teams and promised the kiddywinks' parents a 7-day turnaround. He still had a full-time job, which often demanded 12-hour shifts. The combination of these factors meant that he slept an average of 3 hours a night for a week and a bit and is just now getting back to normal.

I have been far lazier, lolling about and enjoying the good life while my poor boyfriend worked his fingers to the bone. I'd feel guilty about this, except I don't feel guilty very well. So there it is.

My parents have been here, and they just left this morning. My mother came on the 7th of December, and my father followed on the 15th. While they were in Melbourne we went out to the pier a few blocks from here to see the fairy penguins (apparently they are officially called Little Penguins and it is no longer PC to call them "fairy," but I think that's ridiculous and they shall be fairy penguins in my book forever), It took my mother from the other side of the world to introduce me to my neighbourhood - I had no idea there was a colony of fairy penguins living so close. They're adorable little things, about a foot high at their highest. They squawk and call to each other, and they nest in the rocks. They hop from rock to rock to get around, and I have to imagine they are more elegant in the water, as they look like they're going to lose their footing and topple over at any moment as they hop around the rocks. They scurry to and fro right in front of the feet of the tourists out to see them and seem oblivious to their presence. I didn't take any pictures of them because I didn't want to flash lights in their little eyes, but believe me, they were adorable.

We also went down to see the possums, as they seem to be number one on our tourist attraction list when we have visitors. The council has now put collars around most of the trees to keep the possums from having places to live, but they are still plentiful in the park at the end of our street. I don't know where they hide during the day, but there still seems to be plenty of them at night.

Two days after my father arrived we left Melbourne (and poor Leslie) and drove to Kangaroo Island, an island off the coast of South Australia. What we had thought would be a day and a half of driving turned out to be three days (turns out Australia is a big country. Who knew?). We drove along the Great Ocean Road outside of Melbourne. It has beautiful scenery winding around the coast and there are some great views along it, but all that winding around and around made me carsick. I was glad to get off it and take a somewhat less scenic, but also less nausiatingly curvy, road inland.

We stopped off at the Otway Fly, a treetop walk in a national forest in Victoria. We stayed over at a motel near the Fly and had breakfast at a general store/cafe/newsagent/off license (out there you have to be versatile) the next morning. They very nice guy behind the counter suggested we go on a hike around a waterfall before doing the Fly, as it had spectacular scenery and was full of natural beauty and unlikely to be full of tourists. We took his advice, and we were glad we did. The waterfall walk was just spectacular, full of lush greenery and impressive views of the falls. We didn't see many other people there, so we had the woods pretty much to ourselves. On our way out we saw a dingo, who stood and watched us for quite a while until a camera was pointed at him, at which point he scurried off.

Kangaroo Island is a magnificent place. They describe it as "a zoo without cages", and that's fairly accurate, given the amount of wildlife everywhere. We saw a goanna (large Australian monitor lizard), two echidnas (spiny porcupine-like marsupials with long snouts and back feet that are on backwards, allowing it to dig better) and countless koalas, wallabies and kangaroos. There are a few little towns on the island, but most of it is unspoiled bush. I guess much of Australia looked like Kangaroo Island at one point, but it is now one of the last refuges of undestroyed natural habitat left.

The week before we got there, lightening strikes set of devastating bushfires. At one point there were 12 fires going, and the people managed to contain 7 of them. The remaining 5 burned for days, consuming more than 100,000 acres of forest and completely destroying 90% of the big national forest on the island. Fire fighters came from New South Wales to help out, and they cut a huge firebreak through the bush between the forest and the adjacent wildlife sanctuary to try and save the sanctuary. They cut firebreaks and dropped water bombs and burned back bush in other areas to try and keep the fire from people's houses and farms.

The two people who manage the wildlife sanctuary were given the order to evacuate, but they didn't go. They have a huge exclosure (many many square kilometers, it's not a cage) as part of the sanctuary, with an electric fence to keep out wild pigs and feral cats (which are a big problem on the island, as both eat native wildlife). They opened the doors to the exclosure to allow the animals in it to escape if the fire came up that far. A kangaroo called Amy was human-raised (her mother was killed on the roads, as are an awful lot of wildlife) and is very tame and unafraid of human contact. She lives in the exclosure, and she led all the kangaroos in a big procession from the exclosure to the sanctuary managers' house. She actually came inside, hopping around their office, looking for refuge. They fed and watered the animals from the exclosure, and those fleeing the fire in the national park ended up running into the sanctuary as well. The firebreaks held long enough for the wind to change, and the sanctuary was saved. Now it's more of a sanctuary than ever, since they have more than 1,000 refugee animals who fled from the national park. They said they stayed up all night that night, giving food and water to all the wild animals who ended up in their sanctuary.

The koalas in the sanctuary, when they saw the fire, didn't try to run and get away (which they would never have been able to do anyway. Koalas are very slow). They seemed catatonic, sprawled out in their trees, resigned to die. When they didn't and the fire was kept from the sanctuary, they were completely normal the next day. They were lucky, but many in the national park were not so lucky.

The islanders were very shaken and exhausted from the fires, and when we arrived things were just starting to get back to normal. We stayed in a cabin in the wildlife sanctuary, with a gorgeous view out to a beach and lagoon. Dad and I had waterproof housings for our cameras, and we went snorkeling in the water one day. The housings worked and the cameras were unscathed by their underwater trip, but there wasn't much in the bay to take pictures of other than seaweed. We planned to go scuba diving and see coral reefs and fish, but a big storm came up and we were unable to.

There were lots of other activities, though, the highlight of which was a night walk tour through the sanctuary. We met Amy the kangaroo, and she is the world's sweetest kangaroo. When the tour group came into the exclosure, she hopped right up to us, excited for the attention. She seemed to like being petted, and one of the guides gave me some food to feed her. She's very gentle when she eats, putting her front paw on your hand. She's the only human-raised kangaroo in the exclosure, but the managers are currently raising another, Joey. Joey's mother was also the victim of a car, and his leg was broken when he was brought to them. He's now a healthy and feisty one-year-old, and he lives in a pen outside the managers' house. He also loves attention, and tries to play-fight and box with anyone who will play with him. When Joey is another year old he'll also go into the exclosure, where he'll have a large area to explore and be free.

We learned lots of amazing facts about Australian flora and fauna. For example, koalas' fingerprints are the most similar to human fingerprints of any animal. And kangaroos will often have a tiny joey in their pouches while they also have an older joey who can hop for itself but still breastfeeds. They can create two kinds of milk simultaneously, one to suit each of their offspring.

Two koalas were mating in the trees above us as we walked. They make a tremendous amount of noise. The males sound like a combination of a pig and a motorcycle, and the females scream. They really give it loads, and the two combined make an awful racket. Koalas are also pretty stupid - 30% of their brain cavities are empty. But they're adorable, though they sleep 19 hours a day.

We also went into a cave system on the island. There was the option of going "adventure caving," where you slithered around on your belly, but we chose to go instead to the one where you just walk and the caves are big and safe. After seeing The Descent I have no desire to go into claustrophobic caves.

There is a population of New Zealand fur seals and Australian sea lions on the island. They were hunted almost to extinction, but a colony of each remains on the island. We went on a tour to get up close to the sea lions. The adults were exhausted and sleeping, as they spend three days and three nights without sleeping fishing at sea and sleep when they get back to shore. But the little ones were scampering and playing in the surf. It was adorable to see.

That's about all from Kangaroo Island. I could go on, but I don't know if anyone will even have read this far. We're off to New Zealand in a few hours, so we should have an equally long and photo-filled post when we get back from there.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a g'day.