On our way up to Cairns we stopped in at the Billabong Sanctuary because we had been in Australia for almost a month and I still hadn’t seen a kangaroo except for the ones that were dead on the side of the road (and there were hundreds) and a few fields of kangaroos that were too far away to really see.
The Billabong Sanctuary was pretty cool, most of the animals, including kangaroos and emus just wander around, they aren’t kept in enclosures so you can actually see them up close.
The koalas are in little treed areas, with very low fences around them just to keep people out, but you can see them really well (when they aren’t sleeping, which is pretty much all the time).
When you come through the entrance they give you a little bag of seeds and grains that you can feed to some of the animals, but since everyone only wants to be around the kangaroos, the emus get super jealous.
A few times when we were there the kangaroos and the emus came to fisticuffs and we had to dive behind a bluff of trees to avoid being caught in the middle.
One of the kangaroos had a baby joey in her pouch, and it was super strange to see her wandering around with a pair of legs or a face sticking out of the hole at varying intervals.
At one point a guy who was basically Steve Irwin, but with waist length blonde dreads, did a demonstration with 3 of the deadliest snake species in Australia, and told us what to do if we were bit by one. Apparently you should stay where you are, be super calm and wait patiently for the ambulance to come get you.
I probably wouldn’t make it, is the moral of that story.
