We took a trip to the Healesville Sanctuary, about an hour and a half bus ride outside Melbourne. On the way, I got a few pics through the windows of a moving bus. The first is of one of the more attractive skylines.

It’s not uncommon to see murals painted by local artists. Here’s a striking example. The building is a half dozen stories tall. The entire wall is painted with this design.

One might think that no two cities can have less in common than the French-inspired New Orleans in the US and the gritty, practical, and much newer Melbourne in Australia. But the two have at least one unusual feature in common. Melbourne calls them Single Fronted Houses. These houses are narrow and long. They have little natural light, making them feel cold, damp, and uncomfortable in the winter time. But they have been gentrified. If you want one, it will set you back a cool million dollars. New Orleans calls them shotgun houses because you could open the front and back doors, then shoot a shotgun blast through the house without doing any damage. It turns out that it’s no mystery how both cities ended up with an unusual and similar architectural feature. Both governments taxed frontage feet.

The sanctuary had an an open amphitheater where they had a bird show. Birds were trained to fly low around the theater so everybody could get a good look. Each bird had a natural behavior they were trained to exhibit. They flew both prey birds and raptors, but of course not at the same time. They had to delay the show because a wild eagle visited the area. The sanctuary had all the Australian animals we wanted to see. Instead of posting a bunch of boring pictures, I’ll focus on just a few.

This is called an Echidna. I didn’t know about this one. It’s pretty much a marsupial porcupine on steroids.

Somehow I didn’t get a pic of the Wombat. These are a kind of groundhog or mole, but they are larger, more muscular, and have a very thick and strong skull. They also poop rectangles. It seems that nobody knows precisely how they manage to do that. I understand that they stack their scat to attract the opposite sex. They also have a well-earned reputation for doing serious damage to your car if you manage to hit one.

The Platypus is well known but way cool. They are nocturnal animals, so the exhibit was in a dark area. They mostly stay in the water, they are very fast and extremely agile. I had no hope of being able to get a pic. They are much smaller than I expected them to be — between one to two feet long, depending on the sex. They are somewhat like a smaller otter.

Today is a sea day. I hope this finds everybody doing well.