With only a couple of days left to go, all the faffing around and zooming and panning I've had to do thus far to get good photos of indigenous wildlife seemed a bit redundant today.

By leaving Sydney at 7.20am (which was a wrench...), you can arrive at Featherdale Wildlife Park before it opens, before the crowds spook the animals. They have the lot: Tasmanian Devils, all sorts of wombats, birds of many coloured plumage, snakes, crocdiles (see the Flickr photo album for the lot...)

But what you want are your totally bona fide Australian icons up close and personal...

Koala (not bear) whose fur you expect to be wiry, but is, in fact, really cuddly-toy-soft...



Kangaroo/wallaby - not sure I can still tell the difference...



Emu... (minus Rod Hull and a bit too close up...)



And dingoes...



...which look cute as puppies but which carry your children off as adults...

Also on display was this rather oversized joey, which seemed a bit reluctant to leave its mother...



A bit like those five year olds you still see ferried around in pushchairs. Probably eating sweets.

Time for a bit of a lie-in today and then spent the morning in and around Melbourne.

In a recent poll, it is apparently Australia's most "liveable" city and it's easy to see why. There are lots of parks, wide streets and quite a bit of regeneration going on. The riverside is particularly nice, even though the Yarra River is very polluted and they are trying to clean it up.

At Federation Square, they have built some new piece of tessellation masquerading as an arts centre...



...and a steady stream of visitors was ambling through to (not) spend hours looking at the Danish Book Fair (or whatever it was - something akin...)

There is the obligatory bizarre pedestrian bridge (viz Gateshead, Berlin and, Kevin McCloud, Castleford)...



...and some big, non-descript sculptures...



We had time to take the tram to St Kilda...



...which is a bit seasidey: it has those shops where you can buy flip-flops (thongs), a jaunty hat with a slogan, kangaroo scrotum cigarette lighter...



...and it has Luna Park, which contains one of those rickety wooden rollercoasters which looks like it was bolted together in the late forties by prisoners of war and has maybe been checked over for safety purposes at least once every ten years since then.

Lots of excellent places for lunch though! (Of which we only had time, and the stomach, for one...)