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Published: June 26th 2017
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Just a quick post to round up the 2016-17 trip.
The trip as a whole started in October and went like this: Bukit Fraser (Peninsular Malaysia) to Sabah (Malaysian Borneo) to northern India, then to Sri Lanka for a month (as an add-on due to the demonetisation disaster in India) and back to India for a couple of months (going south to north), then to Thailand briefly and through Cambodia for a couple of weeks to Vietnam where I stayed for three months. Ending the trip I headed back through Thailand and Peninsular Malaysia, for about a month total, and then flew to Melbourne where I spent just a few days before returning to New Zealand.
I didn't spend long in Melbourne or do a lot whilst there, largely because Australia is so expensive. I mean, NZ$30 for a dorm bed! I stayed at the King St Backpackers which is where I would always recommend staying. It has the cheapest dorms (or, at least, the cheapest which have no vermin and are actually clean enough to sleep in) but the food situation tips the scales too. It has a free breakfast which is your basic cereals and bread, but
it means you can also sneakily make sandwiches for lunch so the only meal you have to pay for is dinner - and the "free food shelf" (where departing backpackers leave their surplus) sometimes provides even that for free. I only spent about $10 on food over six days. It's location is handy too, being just round the corner from the Southern Cross Train Station, and within easy walking distance of several animal-related spots like the zoo and the aquarium (neither of which I visited this time), the museum, and the Botanic Gardens.
My main aim for Melbourne was to see a moloch or thorny devil. This is one of the coolest lizards in the world. Found in the deserts of central Australia it looks like a jumble of spikes on legs, and feeds solely on ants of one species. I'd like to find one in the wild one day, but for now I had recently discovered that the Melbourne Museum keeps a pair. They aren't out on display most of the time, but once a day they are put into one of the ant tanks to feed. You need to be at the museum at the right time
of day.
I had emailed the Discovery Centre at the museum to check the timing (around 11.30am), so after a few hours wandering around in the Botanic Gardens looking for birds I walked up to the museum. An amazing little lizard. I have put a couple of photos here to show what he looks like.
As for what to do for the rest of the day, I had been looking at my map of the city and seen that Yarra Bend Park didn't look too far away. Five kilometres from the city centre apparently. There is a large colony of grey-headed flying foxes at Yarra Bend which I wanted to see. They used to roost in the Botanic Gardens years ago (where I had seen them on previous visits) but were "encouraged" to move elsewhere because they were killing the trees. The colony resettled at Yarra Bend, which is now the only site to see them in Melbourne.
Although the park may only be five kilometres from the city, the route I took led me to the very opposite side of the park from where the fruit bats were. I didn't mind, it was a nice walk
and I saw some birds along the way, but by the time I had done the complete circuit, seen the bats, and got back to the city again I had probably walked about twenty kilometres. There are, supposedly, black flying foxes in the colony as well, seen there since 2010. I went through all the bats with my binoculars but all the ones I could see were grey-headed flying foxes. Eventually I got bored with examining bats and left. Maybe there are just a few black flying foxes there, maybe a whole group, or maybe they are just brief visitors - I don't know the answer to that, but I've seen black flying foxes before, in Australia and Indonesia, so it wasn't all that important.
The next day I went to Sherbrooke Forest, which is easy to get to - just catch the train to Belgrave station and then walk through the forest. Sherbrooke is a great site for superb lyrebirds (I saw three today) and there's also a bird-feeding area which attracts various parrot species, although today the only attendants were sulphur-crested cockatoos and crimson rosellas which were studiously ignoring the tourists with their handfuls of seeds. However,
an animal I wanted to try and see here more was a wombat. I had found out not too long ago that wombats were common at Sherbrooke. They are nocturnal of course, so I took my torch with me and planned to stay out there until the evening.
On the Neumann Track I found a large grassy slope which was covered in wombat droppings and signs of their digging. I've seen wombats in Tasmania and there they tend to come out in the late afternoon when there is still enough light for viewing and photography. Tasmanians are pretty obliging. I was hoping the same would be the case here. From the grassy slope back to the bird-feeding area is about 2km and from there to the Belgrave station is about 3km, so about 5km altogether which I had to walk back, and I knew that not only were there loads of rusa deer in these forests but that this particular area along the Neumann Track had a lot of shooting to cull them. Getting shot while walking back in the dark was not really to my liking. But, you gotta do what you gotta do.
Because it is
winter it gets dark very early, around 5.30pm. The first mammals to appear were eastern grey kangaroos at around 5pm, hopping out of the forest to graze. I was keeping an eye on two wombat burrows, at least one of which was definitely active judging by all the dirt outside it. No wombats were coming out before dark though. At 5.20pm or so I had a little wander to see if any were elsewhere in the meadow, and found a swamp wallaby but no wombats. Back to watching the burrows, and just on 5.30pm, when it was just light enough to make them out but also dark enough to not be able to photograph them, a wombat and her baby came strolling through. I made it back to Belgrave without getting shot.
Apart for a visit to St. Kilda pier to see some little blue penguins and Australian water rats, the only other places I went were to Moonlit Sanctuary because I know the owner and to Healesville Sanctuary where I haven't been for ten years. Both are brilliant zoos for native Australian wildlife and are highly recommended. There are also quite a lot of native wild birds in
their grounds.
And then I flew back to New Zealand.
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