Here is my attempt at dangerous wildlife photography...



This is the home of a real-life, funnel-web spider.

If it pops out and bites you, you have a window of about three hours to get to the anti-venom before you die an agonising, poisoned death.

If I were clever I would have done that thing with the photo where you look at it for a long time and then, without warning, the spider pops out and sends you flying across the room..

Who's to say I haven't...?

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.

You knew it was coming at some point, didn't you...



Unfortunately, it went again so quickly that me and my camera had difficulty keeping up....

Kangaroo appears courtesy of Sydney Wildlife World. See Flickr photos for ants (big), wallabies (similar to kangaroos and actually different if you are concentrating, koalas (cute), spiders (furry), snakes (deadly, but behind glass), butterflies (enormous, but colourful), crocodiles (handbag), lizardy things (various), stick insects (giant), scorpions (dangerous) etc...

I spent a while typing this entry the other day and then the computer crashed and I lost it all.

Never mind - here's what I think I was going to say...

The drive to Sydney down the Pacific Highway is a long one, taking us three days with a couple of handy stopovers on the way. The first is at Coffs Harbour and the second at Maitland, in Hunter Valley Wine Country...

On the first stretch, we stopped in at Byron Bay, which is slightly hippy and surfy...



...but has about 1001 places where you could have lunch (but only one where we did) and, it goes without saying, beautiful coastline...



Nearby is the fantastic Byron Bay Lighthouse...



...and - didn't know this until we got there -





Of course, if that particular point is only several hundred metres down a path, then you have to go there just to say you have...

And on the way, we saw Australia's Most Easterly Monitor Lizard...



...which I think they should have added to the signpost.

As we left the Kingfisher Bay Hotel and Resort Center Parcs Experience this morning (I added the last bit...), we finally got a look back at where we had been staying.

It's on the shoreline and hidden by the trees from further inland, so you can't get a good view of it from anywhere really. This was the best I could manage...



...and that's on the zoom limit of the camera.

You have to fill in a little survey card when you leave to say what you thought. (When I say "you have to...", I don't mean they feed you to the dingoes if you don't, or anything like that - it's just suggested.) Most of the stay was brilliant and so got ticks in the far left boxes (or the far right ones...) and the food in the Seabelle restaurant was the absolute best of the holiday so far, but I did find myself mentioning the birds in the breakfast room.

Swooping down from the rafters to pick at anything that was left on tables, or stealing bits of croissant from the servery, (of which unsuspecting guests then selected the remainder and ate), occasionally chased by waitresses with those hand-held plant spray things, I assume full of irritating bird poison fluid guaranteed to cause agonising death, but I suspect full of water. How water will deter them, I'm not sure, given that it sometimes rains...

Indoor birds seems to be a common phenomenon here. Lots of coffee shops have them, they are rife in shopping centres. No-one seems to give it much thought, nor pay any atention when they dive-bomb some scrap of dinner nearby, narrowly missing taking your ear off with their outstretched, gliding razor-wings. And perhaps it's only me that's bothered.