Transcending Borders With Seeds in Our Hands

I went to the Billabong Koala and Wildlife Park in Port Macquarie today. The woman at the reception of my hostel told me to catch the bus at 9:05. I got to the bus station at 9:00 (it was 8:50 when I asked about the bus) and got down to the stop and waited and waited…and waited. I saw a number for the bus information line and I called and asked when the bus leaves for the Billabong Park and the operator said “8:55”. Great. When did the next one come? “10:55”. Awesome. So I kicked around the mall which was small and quite boring. I went into Big W, the Australian answer to Wal-Mart and as I was leaving one of the cashiers said, “Excuse me, sir. Can I have a look through your bag?”. It was my shoulder bag that had my sunscreen, camera, etc. in it. She looked through it and simply said, “thanks”. I was not really in the mood to deal with that but I didn’t want to make a scene and I definitely didn’t want to look suspicious.

Finally my bus came and I bought a round-trip ticket. We rode along and the bus driver yelled “Billabong.” I looked out the window and only saw a road leading to the right, hardly the park entrance gate I was expecting. I asked the driver when he would be back to pick me up (I was the only one getting off at the stop) and he gave me a slip of paper that had “150 350 505” scrawled on it. He said, “Just wait over there,” pointing in the most general direction; somewhere near the edge of the woods. I got off and walked up the road (which ended up being about the length of our dead-end road at home) and reached the park. I paid the entrance fee along with the 50 cents of kangaroo feed. I walked around the park and saw the most poisonous snake in the world, which can kill over 50,000 mice with a single bite. I saw strange marsupials and colorful exotic birds. Then I wandered over to the kangaroo, wallaroo, and wallaby feeding area. I was quite impressed and it was definitely the highlight. I got to lay down next to a little wallaby and feed it and pet it. The best part was that I felt like I had the whole park to myself. There were no rangers supervising me or any crowds of kids. I moved on the the baby kangaroos and they were the most adorable little creatures. They had those big, dark eyes and long eyelashes that baby deer have. They were a little bit more shy though and it was hard to get them to stay around for long before they hopped away. I got lots of great pictures, although I think that somehow my camera lost all of them (we’ll talk about that in the next post).

I left the park, after buying a traditional Australian leather hat. The particular hat that I wanted had no price on it so I was prepared to pay about $55 for it judging by the rest of the hats. I got up to the counter and the girl said that she would have to check on the price. She went away and came back and said “25 dollars”. I was sure there was some mistake but I wasn’t going to complain!

I wandered back down to the “bus stop” early to be sure not to miss the 3:50 bus because I definitely had seen enough of the park and had accumulated quite a nasty headache by then. I waited and then saw the bus coming. I assumed he was going to stop so I just stood there, watching him come towards me…and then fly past me. I was furious. A bunch of things started running through my head from “now I have to walk all the way back to town and I don’t even know how to get back and it might get dark…” to “now I have to wait around for over an hour”. I opted for the latter because I had already paid the fare and I knew that it was quite a long walk back. I had to sit at the end of the road, having that uncomfortable feeling as drivers drove past and stared at me as if I were a destitute hitchhiker. At 5:10 I saw the bus come around the curve a ways down and this time I walked right up to the edge of the road and waved my hand to be sure he knew to pick me up. I got back to town and walked to Baskin Robbins for a pick-me-up. It was a rough day from the bus to the Wal-Mart hassle to the bus, but I did have some great things to counter the bad, like the fact that I got to pet and hug and feed joeys and koalas. By the way, the koala was the softest, fuzziest animal I’ve ever pet.

I was pleasantly surprised by the country town of Murwillumbah. It is a sizable town but refuses to get any bigger than it already is. I checked into the Murwillumbah/Mt. Warning YHA and it sits right on the Tweed river with views of Mt. Warning. It’s a very nice hostel and the guy who was managing it, Gary, was a lot of fun. He served us free ice cream every night at 9 pm and he always made neat designs with gummy shape toppings. We played a game that is a tradition at the hostel called Zilch. It is a dice game where you roll and try to get certain combinations while avoiding a “zilch” which means you lose your turn and, after three of them, 1000 points. I sucked the first night but the second night I got the all-time high score. Gary made a certificate of achievement and hung it on the wall.

The next day we headed up to the mountain to do the hike. It was overcast so we knew the view at the top would not be great but we had to do it because they only take people to the mountain two or three times a week. Along the way to the mountain we listened to a recorded commentary made by the owner of the hostel, Tassie (so called because he is from Tasmania). He had an interesting accent. It wasn’t that much different from the Australian one but put emphasis on certain words and was a little more sing-songey. We got to the base of the mountain after driving past cattle and banana farms and unloaded from the van with a big green mountain painted on the side door. We began the hike through the subtropical rainforest and I took my camera out to take a picture of a huge tree and realized, after several attempts to turn it on, that it was out of batteries. So I actually got to enjoy the hike, not worrying about whether some view would make a great picture. The Germans I was with (I cannot escape them!) said that they would put pictures on my USB stick. We didn’t see any rock wallabies like we heard we might but we did see these big, colorful turkeys on parts of the trail. We neared the top and it turned into temperate rainforest meaning that there are less species of trees and plants that can survive. The last bit climbing toward the top was LITERALLY a vertical, loose-rock scramble. There was a chain that you grabbed a hold of and hung onto for dear life as you tried to find the foot holds. It seemed to last forever and it took probably 25 minutes to do it. We got to the top and were not rewarded with much of a view. It was even cloudier at the top and we simply drank some water and ate an apple and then headed back down.

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