We’ve been in Australia, a place we’ve wanted to go for a long time, for about three weeks. It is a bird and wildlife lovers’ paradise, which is about what we expected. It is also, seemingly, the friendliest place on earth, and that’s no hyperbole. I’m not sure how to explain it, but nearly everyone we meet instantly becomes a fast friend and offers us every hospitality. Even the snakes, all of which are venomous and in a certain sense deadly and terrifying, seem polite. We just finished about 350km of hiking and all of the many we encountered slithered off without malice. Koala, one of ten or so we saw on this particular day of the Great Southwest Walk, in Victoria, Australia.
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To my mind these are among the very most charming of creatures, scurrying, farming, "eeping," and popping in and out of hidey-holes. We saw so many--literally hundreds--of pika on the Wonderland Trail that I greatly regretted the absence of any kind of wildlife camera. I took this with the relatively ancient and practically unused Canon S120, which I recently rediscovered buried in a junk drawer, and which somehow still thinks that it is 2014.
Pika, Wonderland Trail, Mount Rainier National Park, Washington.
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Puget Sound Garter Snakes, Olympia, Washington.
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Golden fleabane (I believe) and Mount Rainier, from the Old Snowy alternate of the Pacific Crest Trail, Goat Rocks Wilderness, Washington Cascades.
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And a pretty big one. I suspect an Eastern Bearded Dragon, but I'm far from sure. Please feel free to correct me. Great Southwest Walk, somewhere in the vicinity of Portland, Victoria.
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