Australia with the Windahl family: Day 10 Melbourne Zoo and last night in Richmond

Koala

Wombat

We thought that the best way to see the Australian animals, such as koala and kangaroo would probably be to go to a zoo. I am not in general particularly fond of zoos, but when I googled Melbourne Zoo seemed to be quite a decent one. So we took the tram there and bought our tickets. The weather was very good for a day at the zoo, around 25 degrees and some wind. It was very sunny, and a very good thing that the zoo was built with a lot of shadow, both for humans and other animals. It turned out to be a really fine zoo, large enclosures for the animals with very different character depending on which kind of habitat was suitable for the different animals. We saw very few animals that showed a stressed behavior, in general it was quite far between the animals and the visitors also. We started with the Australian part, and got to see a wombat, a koala, emus, kangaroos and also various birds in a huge voliere. There we saw different ibis-birds, black cockatoos and the famous black swans. For a former student of philosophy it was of course extra rewarding to see a black swan for the first time. The black swan theory is a classical example in philosophy, which has to to with a classical quote: "rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno" (a rare bird in the lands and very much like a black swan) referring to something that does not exist, since it was believed that black swans did not exist. According to logic it only takes one observation of a black swan to undermine the logic of the quote. This also happened when black swans were observed by Europeans during the 17th century in Australia.

Kangaroo, wallaby

Black swan

Meerkat

There was of course a lot of other animals as well; tiger, lion, elephant, meerkats, snow leopard etc. The very best of today, if you ask me was however the very special, and very Australian platypus. The little fellow was swimming around under water and coming up for air, they had arranged like an aquarium with darkness during daytime since the platypus is nocturnal. They had equipped the room with red light so visitors could see, really smart since apparently it is otherwise difficult to see a platypus. Overall it was a well organized and good zoo, totally worth going to see the Australian animals. We then went back to Richmond and had dinner in Bridge street, again. We could have been going out to different restaurants for several weeks, in the closest neighborhood. All three have been really good, even if the first two: the vVietnamese Paper Plate and the Japanese we tried yesterday were better than todays Italian. Tomorrow we will leave and take the Great Ocean Road. I will miss our beautiful airbnb with all the stylish interior, and fine art on the walls.