This day has been really challenging, and both AK and I are now sitting in the hotel room completely exhausted after the day's events. It has been both an exciting day with amazing animals, but also a day of horror, I begin to wonder if there is any form of theme on our trip considering everything that has happened to us so far;) Okay, now I will tell you about our day, but first I need to say something about “Band of Horses”. The name of the band obviously gets ten points out of ten, but when it comes to the music I can’t say that it was my favourite music, to be honest the music was pretty awful! I don’t think it will be anymore “Band of Horses” for us...
After the delicious breakfast, which consisted of a delicious and nutritious smoothie with banana, spinach and raspberries, we took a bus to a firm where we would rent a car to go outside the city to a forest where we heard that it could be koalas. The car renting went smoothly and we got some tips about driving in Australia. Apparently, it’s left traffic something we didn’t knew before. But naive as we were, we thought it wouldn’t be a major problem, yeah right, lol ;)
To drive during the rush hour in Sydney on a weekday morning was not the best choice we could have done. Firstly, it was very difficult to drive on the left side of the road and although I have been driving for almost 2 years, I felt really insecure. Secondly, the major problem to understand the turn signal. When I was swinging on the turning signal the windscreen wiper went on and it took a while before we realized that they had changed their places if you compare with a car in Sweden. Thirdly, it was annoying cyclists everywhere on the way to work. Since there are quite long queues in the inner city many people take their bikes to work to be in time, but the problem came when instead of showing consideration the bikers were everywhere and didn’t bother to check where they were going, soooo irritating, according to me!! As it wasn’t enough to try to understand the left traffic without running into anyone, no, now we had to keep track of cyclists on both sides of the road too!
If we are to describe the ride through Sydney in one word, I would probably say that it was chaos. Even when we were driving out of the parking lot where we rented the car I drove over to the right side and realized it when the man who rented the car ran after us, screaming like a madman. Then I realized and after that I managed to mostly keep the car on the left side of the road, but it really wasn’t easy. After the drive we experienced today, AK will probably report me to Sweden's worst drivers! No doubts!!
In Sweden I would say that I’m a pretty good driver, but the left traffic here in Australia was just too much and I can imagine that both I and AK screamed and looked like two dizzy chickens when we tried to drive out from Sydney. It would take about two hours to the forest and the first 20 minutes went pretty well, until I came to a roundabout and AK lost the direction so we didn’t know in which direction we were going, so in some mysterious way, we managed to end up in the wrong file and also in the wrong direction, so I drove on the right side of the road. I realized that when an oncoming car came and thought it was strange that he didn’t move, he probably thought the same thing about me. I realized I had to change side of the road when AK screamed next to me that it was left hand traffic and instead of running over on the right side of the road I put the gas in the ground so that the car flew up on the sidewalk and straight into the fence and the mailbox on the other side of the road. Not the best parking I have done ;) Luckily the person who lived in the house didn’t come out and AK and I managed to slip away, mischievous! After that experience we were really scared and drove very slowly, so slow that it was some idiot who crashed into us from behind. Now we had to pay the damages, like it was not enough with the mailbox ;)
After much trouble we arrived at the forest with eucalyptus trees. We saw some wild koalas and it was really something special because it's not so common to see them outside of cities like this. Koalas live in the eastern parts of Australia and they spend most of their time at the top of the eucalyptus trees. You maybe have wondered why it looks like koalas hug the trees, and it’s apparently because it has a chilling effect on them. During the heat wave the trees temperatures are much lower than the air and Koalas presses their stomachs against the cool tree to stay cold. They are very special because they are the only animals in the world that live exclusively on eucalyptus leaves. These leaves contain some kind of poison so other animals can’t eat them.
Koalas are also very picky animals and do not even drink water. The fluid that they must have comes from the eucalyptus leaves. They are also picky when it comes to what kind of leaves they like. Of the hundreds of eucalyptus species in Australia koalas only eat three or four of these. In order to break down the leaves and the poison, it takes a lot of energy and they sleep up to 18 hours per day to conserve energy.
The koalas we saw were sleeping in a tree in a distance, but we could go pretty close and managed to get a clear picture of the animals, it was really something! It was probably even worth the horrible drive.
The koalas we saw were sleeping in a tree in a distance, but we could go pretty close and managed to get a clear picture of the animals, it was really something! It was probably even worth the horrible drive.
When we had been there a while, we realized that the time was more than we thought and we had to drive back in order to return the wrecked rental car. We were hoping that he wouldn’t require too much money. On the way back into town, we saw a group of red kangaroos that stood on a field eating some grass. The red kangaroo is the largest marsupial and an average medium red kangaroo is about 1.5 meters high. They can jump over a 3 meter high fence. We actually thought that we wouldn’t see any because they are primarily active at dawn and dusk, but since it was early evening, we probably had the luck on our side.
When the red kangaroos had crossed the road we continued the drive back to Sydney. This time it went a little bit better, but given that we have already wrecked the car, maybe we can’t say that the drive went well, or what do you think? ;) Once back at the rental guy, that wasn’t the most happy person anymore, we tried to explain what had happened with an innocent tone, but he didn’t believe our story about that it wasn’t our fault and we had to pay a few thousand to fix the car, perhaps not the best, but totally worth it because we saw both wild koalas and red kangaroos! // Emma