The Melbourne Zoo

WARNING!! There are over 100 photo's in this blog. Do not continue unless you have a lot of internet and a bit of time!!
Our next day away from the smoke was to the Melbourne zoo! Vline is letting Morwell and surrounding places travel for free on the trains, and since the trains and the busses are connected we are able to go to Melbourne and anywhere IN Melbourne for nothing so long as we stick to trains and busses.
SO! I packed up a lunch for everyone, and we hop on the 8:30am train to Melbourne!
On the way out of town we see the damage original fire did (before it got into the mine).

Okay, so from Morwell to Royal Park (the Zoo station) takes about three hours and one train change, so we were all pretty happy to be there! Also it was lunch time, so fortunately you could SEE the zoo from the station!

And as you can see our first stop was lunch!

Alright now we saw the WHOLE zoo in only four hours, so I won't be able to remember all the animal names! But they are in order so.... our first animal was this pygmy pig, and they were kind enough to lay where we could see them easily!

Next was a slightly larger piggy, and he was not so photogenic.

Baboons!! Our first monkeys!

And then were the giraffes and zebra's. The giraffes were enormous! Easily the tallest animals there, and there were three of them! A Dad a Mum, and a baby!

Eli saying Hurry up! You are taking too long!

Next we passed a pair of koala's, who seemed very unemotional, lol!

And then we entered into this huge bird enclosure!Most of these birds I don't know the proper names of!!

babies!!

You can see from the photo above just how big this place was!

And then we travelled out the other side into this paddock which had emu, kangaroos and walabies in it.

And straight out the other side an enclosure with a peacock and a Tasmanian devil in it. WE only saw the peacock.

Which way next?

 Okay, these are cute little fluffy monkeys that Hadassah fell in love with.

 These are tree kangaroos,

 Gibbons. The cream one is 47 years only, and the black 39!!

This is a pygmy hippo, who was gorgeous!

 Down there is his nose above the water.

 This photo represents a small panic. We had lost Hadassah. You see what was happening was Dassah was being cute, by running to the next stop. And this time she got turned around and ran the wrong direction, and we lost each other! So Michael went ahead while I went back (we didn't know where she was at this stage) and I found her back a ways with a zoo employee. She did not panic, but found someone who worked there (identified by a name badge) and had told them her name and her difficulty, and had let them take care of her. I am so proud of her as she and I did this once before in MidValley shopping Centre (getting lost), and when I had found her (then in a huddled heap in a corner) I had a stern talk to her about what to do in this sort of an emergency, and she listened and she did it! I am so chuffed! ANd probably not as mad as I would have been otherwise, too.

 Here we are at the gorilla's. The mobile phones are there in the pillars to tell every one that every time you recycle your old phone you help the gorilla's. (no actual gorilla photo's it seems, I seem to have lost them.

 Here we are at the lemurs enclosure. They were feeling full and tired having just been fed.

 This is the tiki hut outside the lemur enclosure.

 This is the jungle gym that belongs to the little black orang-utans.

 Here is Phebe climbing on the wooden orang-utans.

 And there is the orange orang-utans window.
This wee baby was playing for the camera.

 So was the Mumma.

 While Dad just looked on.

 And above is a shot I got of Mumma and Baby together.
Below is a sort of game they had for the people to show which items you buy is the shop that are best for the environment.

 And here we come to the other orang-utans.
The fellow in the hay swung down and put a green cloth over his head and proceeded to meditate.

While this dude swung down with his tarpaulin and rolled around in it for us.

 We walked passed this huge pond which was full of turtles and pelicans.

This one is just chilling, dude.

Next we headed onto the elephant walk. Michael was the most impressed with this as they had put a lot of effort into making it feel authentic.

 Everyone was so chuffed! There was a baby!

 Malachi reading the map.

 There were these little shrines here, and I thought they were darling.

At the end of the elephant walk there was an eatery, and so out came the packed lunches again, and while we were eating, Michael bought a coffee (having left his Thermos in the car, he was without).

 Our next stop was the butterfly tent! There were soo many butterflies, and they were really tame! If you stopped for long enough they landed on you!

 They had these reallly cool looking dinner plates to eat off.

 One tiger. But he was more interested in the gate than in the people gawking at him.

This is my attempt at catching a photo of an otter.
In this one the splash is him.

 In this one you can see him at the top of the rocks almost hidden by the leaves,

 Here he is looking over the mossy rock at me.

 This is in the centre of the park. The children found it interesting. We had to read it out to them ;)

 This tree was also in the centre. The girls wanted piccies of themselves on it.

 An awesome lizard.

 And another one.

 A pair of birds.

 Okay, these monkeys had the most glorious tales!

 And these cute little things were another of the ones Hadassah wanted to bring home.

And these little fellows, too. Can't remember what they were called, though.

 This huge tree was near the carousel. (Dassah wanted to go on the afore mentioned carousel, only to be devastated when she learned it would not be operational till the next day). WE had another snack pitstop, and a wee bit of a play.

Eli tried to escape, but I caught him.

 

 Next we went and saw seals and penguin. We went underground and viewed them from underneath first, but I couldn't take any photo's there. Here are the penguins on top.

 We saw some lions, and the children were enthralled when one started to roar. Phebe said it made her tummy jiggle.

 I think these were meercats. Dassah is in love again.

 The bear did not want his photo taken. He went to bed.

 And at last we come to Eli's favourite. The spiders! In here was the most animated he had been the whole visit!

The trip home was pretty quiet. They finished the snacks on the three hour ride home, and we picked up chippies just before we got home. The children were awake enough to eat them and have a quick wash, and roll into bed!
It was a loooong, but good day.