Sorry for the Group Email

EDIT: There have been some changes around here - instead of sprinkling images throughout like a crazy photographic fairy, they’re all obediently lined up. Click on one to see a higher-resolution, larger image. And let me know what you think of the new system - whether you love it or hate it - in the comments section.

After Featherdale wildlife park, Taronga zoo needed sensational pulling power. Not only is it more expensive, but at Featherdale you could actually touch the animals, and there aren’t many zoos that let you do that.

It’s Australia that convinces me that God has a sense of humour that makes Russell Brand seem as by-the-numbers as Rolf Harris. Hardly any of its animals walk: they slither, crawl and bounce conspicuously across the outback, and despite it being our second zoo in as many weeks, we wandered around Taronga gazing keenly at Australia’s finest.

We saw, for the first time, a platypus. This is my favourite creature. There aren’t, I suspect, many animals in the world to whom mankind’s reaction was a collective, “You must be joking.” The first scientist to describe a platypus was George Shaw in 1799, whose reaction involved a dead platypus and a pair of scissors: not in the name of dissection and discovery, you understand, but rather because he was convinced that the half-reptile, half-mammal duck-fish-lizard hybrid on the table before him was a stitch-up: the taxidermist equivalent of a whoopie cushion.

I always thought a platypus would be the size of a large lizard - about two feet long, let’s say - but the one we saw was twelve inches long at most, and was captivatingly, splendidly weird. The platypus is an accomplished swimmer, and can rest underwater for up to 14 minutes. It also has some of the finest hair anywhere on the planet: up to 900 hairs per square millimeter of skin, according to one site. They are also - and I suspect this is a requirement for any animal wishing to make a go of it in Australia - incapacitatingly poisonous. The male has spurs on its hind leg, and although it doesn’t produce enough venom to kill a grown human, getting stung would be seriously painful.

We wandered around the zoo for a day, wishing fervently that someone would throw something chunky and meaty into the lion enclosure to liven them up a bit.

The lions were asleep.

The next day we went whale watching. Whale watching in Sydney is something that you only get a limited amount of time to do: whales only go past the city between May and November, and the end of August is the last time the tour operators will guarantee a sighting. With the promise of a guaranteed whale in the backs of our minds, we climbed onto a boat.

Sydney Harbour really is an amazing-looking place. The water is blue and almost perfectly still: not as much as a wave laps against the Opera House. Sydney operates a huge number of ferries which - and this is great - are the fastest and cheapest way to get around, which means that you not only get to take boats across one of the most scenic waterfronts in the world, but that to do otherwise would actually take longer. We perched on the front of the boat.

(I believe the professionals call it the bow, although it may equally be the stern. Or the bridge.)

As we left the harbour’s protection we hit the open water. The boat pitched backwards and forwards: the swell was a meter (I heard, crushingly, a crew-member describe it as “only” a meter), and we did an awful lot of lurching. The boat would tip all the way up and back, and then as it crested the wave the bow fell forward into the water. It was dry, but rather rough, and whenever there was no point on the horizon to look at I silently, earnestly, repeated a customised version of the mariner’s prayer.

“Dear God. Please don’t let me vomit. I’m wearing clean jeans and carrying an expensive camera that I’m not sure will survive my own stomach acid. And if I have to throw up, let Mendy do it as well. Misery loves company, you know.”

We spend the better part of an hour and a half sailing towards Bondi Beach in hunt of a pod of whales that had been seen that morning. At one point I clambered up in search of the toilet and headed to the back of the boat. Huddled there was the sorriest group of tourists I’ve ever seen. Plastic sickbags in their pale green hands and lips purple with cold, they were a picture of perfect misery. A small child gripped his bag as if it were a life preserver and looked forlornly at the horizon while his queasy mother silently recited her own version of my don’t-let-me-be-sick prayer. I was disturbed to note an Indian chap who had earlier asked me to take a picture of him and his wife staring brokenly over the side, a small piece of vomit glued to his lower lip.

At that point, I suspected, a whale could have been beamed into a space-ship beside us and they wouldn’t have batted an eyelid.

Finally, a whale broke cover. After brochure pictures of whales frollicking and breaching like enourmous, barnacle-covered submarines, it was just the tinsiest bit disappointing. Not to disparage whales, but we’d been looking for an hour and a half on rather rough seas, and the most active our whale got was occasionally popping a fin over the waves and spouting water. If it sounds hopelessly cynical, you have to remember that to take a picture I had to close one eye and focus on something, which increased the danger of me reproducing my breakfast in an eye-catching and slippery fashion all over the deck. I wanted drama.
After three hours at sea - but at no point without sight of land - we chugged back into the harbour. As soon as we were within sight of the Opera House the waves stilled and for the first time, I had a distorted vision of what arriving in Australia must have been to the sailors who disembarked there in 1787.

Under the command on Captain Arthur Phillip, 11 boats with more than a thousand people on them landed in Sydney after 252 days at sea, braving not only a kind of seasickness that must have become rather wearing after 15,000 miles, but also astonishingly depraved conditions, scurvy and a ration of three pints of water per day each. Merely the sight of dry land would have been cause of celebration — the fact that the dry land was Sydney Harbour all the better. They didn’t know at the time, of course, that Sydney was just about the only arable land for thousands of miles, but simply getting off the boats was the acheivement of a lifetime.

And that was before they spotted the platypus.

Dave is thinking sea-sickness pills next time. More, of course, in the Flickr set.