The next post

Some of you are probably wondering how we are getting around.  Just before leaving, we entered the speculative foreign auto market and, on Tessa's advice, we purchased a Ford Laser.  The name alone filled our minds with a vivid image of me driving a sleek black car through the streets of Montenegro with Eva Green reclining in the passenger seat.  Um ... maybe that was just my mind.  In any event, when I learned it was a 1992 Ford Laser, it filled my mind with an image of fuzzy dice, fuzzy blue seat covers, and a fuzzy Kurt Cobain reclining in the passenger seat eating a box of French Toast Crunch.  That, sadly, was the more accurate image and, more broadly, the metaphor of my life.

Behold.  The laser.

For those of you who repressed the 90s, ours is the white tin can.  As our Australian host informed us prior to our arrival, the car indeed retained the capacity to move forwards and in reverse.  It can "harken" you back to a simpler time, when locking the car required you to hold up the handle of the door as you closed it and using the air conditioner reduced the top speed to 10 kph.  A time when you had to crank open the windows by hand (which was very confusing to our daughters ... "you mean I have to use my arms to open the windows????").  A time when pine tree air fresheners were a necessity rather than a luxury and the most serious problem involved picking out which flannel shirt conveyed apathy the best.

But I have to admit, it got us to Cleland Wildlife Park.




Cleland is an interactive wildlife experience, which essentially means that you can purchase $3 pouches of compressed sawdust pellets that you drop on the sidewalk before running from a horde of rats that have been renamed things like "bandicoot" and "potoroo."  Or, if you're Lily, you giggle while the "bandicoots" swarm over your feet.  If you're Amy, you giggle because intense fear has caused hallucinations.

Neither of us thinks this is a good idea

While Lily dutifully doled out small portions of her sawdust to the hantavirus carrying critters, Tessa adopted a more efficient dispersal strategy -  which essentially consisted of dumping the packet in front of an already satiated and plump kangaroo and then asking Lily to share.









My daughters encouraged me to participate.  They said, "Daddy.  You spend so much of your life just watching it go by.  Do something with your life!  Go feed a kangaroo."  After an intense ten minutes of badgering, I nervously agreed and approached the smallest kangaroo I could find.  I made soothing sounds, like "I've never had a kangaroo steak" and "I support voting rights for animals." It made little difference.

Other notable characters we encountered ...

Sleeping Dingo.

The "bullet wound to the head" emu.

The Fatalistic Koala.  From his expression, I realized that he simultaneously learned a) that he cannot climb any higher to escape us because b) he is a fat, slow moving bear like creature.

Then we came upon the enclosure that I'd been seeking.  In an excited whisper, I called out "Girls!  This ... is the dreaded Tasmanian devil."  They gathered around the enclosure and spent a long moment staring at the "devil" before looking back at me in what can only be described as disappointment of both the animal and their father.  In an effort to save the moment, I said, "He's got huge, sharp ... he can leap about.  Look at the bones."  Not getting the reference, they turned back to stare at the immobile creature (or possibly look for bones).  Our collective disenchantment would be hard to overstate.  I don't know whether to blame Warner Brothers, Geico commercials, or Tasmania itself, but we definitely expected some whirling, slavering, or motion of some kind.  Perhaps Tasmania is so desperate for press that they are exaggerating the deadliness of local fauna.  To give credit where it is due, Tasmanian Devil does sound much more ominous than Large Sleepy Rat.