H-moon Recap: Wildlife encounters

This week, I get my wedding video back and I was waiting for that before I start full blown recaps...even though I've had my pro pics for over a week now.  I will explain it all in a post in the next day or two.

But for now, I wanted to share about the little creatures we encountered (mostly in Australia) on our honeymoon.  I was super excited about the wildlife we might see as I have heard Australia is known for it's different and unique wildlife.  I was sad we didn't go to the Australian zoo since we were only about 2 hours or so away from it.  But we still had a few moments...

In Burleigh Beach, we woke up one morning and stepped out onto our balcony to find the most beautiful little bird.  Mr Fix It quickly told me to throw him some bread and the little colorful beauty immediately walked over to him and began chowing down.  I grabbed my camera and caught the following:

A few minutes later, there were FIVE of them on our balcony!  One night while we were in the jacuzzi, the managers of the apartments came out and told me to come out on their back porch.  I wrapped a towel around me and headed out with them to find Graham feeding these kookaburra birds (known as the Laughing Jackasses of Australia) out of his hand.  He was feeding them raw ground beef!!!

When we headed up to O'Reilly's Retreat in Lamington National Park, we came across a few other little critters.  As we headed to our room while unpacking the car, I jumped about 5 feet in the air when something just to the left of my foot caught my eye.  Mr Fix It laughed hysterically at me (after he freaked out wondering if I had just come across a snake) and we calmed down enough to find that the retreat was covered with these little ones:

We called them mini kangaroos but one of the retreat workers told us they're called pademelons.  There were a ton of them along with these little turkey looking birds off of our back porch in the field by our room.

On the way back down the mountain, we came across the Alpaca cafe where we had lunch on a patio with a gorgeous view of the valley...and these alpacas I caught on video:

Finally, there was our big 'I can't believe that happened to us story!' in Australia.  We only spent one night at O'Reilly's rainforest retreat.  So while we were there, we decided to do a good long hike through the rainforest of course.  We spent about 4 1/2 hours hiking through some muddy but beautiful foliage finding waterfalls and such.  (I'll share more about the pretty sights in a future recap.)

At one point on the hike, the trail map indicated you will have to wade through water that could be up to your waist to get to the other side of the trail.  I told Mr Fix It that wasn't happening...but thankfully, when we got to the crossing point, it was only just above the ankles.  Still, we didn't want to get our tennis shoes and pants all wet, so we decided to roll up our jeans and carry our socks and shoes across. 

As I took off my shoes I noticed this huge red blotch stain on the heel of my sock.  I took off my sock and said to Mr Fix It "Is that blood?  Did I cut myself on something and not know it?"  He looked at it and said, "Yeah, what the heck did you do?"  I told him I had no idea.  I proceeded to take off my other shoe and guess what?  The same exact thing on my other sock and heel!  Only this time, I noticed a tiny little black worm like thing in my sock.  I said to him "Oh my gosh!  Are those leeches?!?  There's leeches in my shoes!"  Sure enough, we had both had some little leeches find their way onto our shoes and they were sucking on our skin through the socks.  They didn't come off easy either and Mr Fix It only had a couple little spots of blood...not nearly the big huge amounts that they got out of me! 

The rest of the trip, we cracked jokes about the thirsty little blood suckers that attacked us in the rainforest.  I tried to get a shot of them but this was the best I could do...we found this one on Mr Fix It's shirt while we were standing on a deck at our hotel...no idea where it came from!  Watch closely, he's only there for a second...

Bali didn't offer us much in the way of animals other than insects like mosquitoes and this one cow I would pass each morning on my walk to the internet cafe.  It was a scraggly sickly looking thing but Mr Fix It said that cows are apparently worshipped in Bali.  Whatever.  They also had some pretty mangy looking dogs roaming the streets while we were shopping.

Overall, it was fun to come across a few animals and such on our trip.  I think I liked the leeches the best just because it gave us something truly memorable from our big day.