Last week Amanda and I trekked a little north of Sydney to Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. You wouldn’t know it from the wilderness, but the park is just a half hour north of the city and is a great little getaway. I sometimes feel a bit overwhelmed by Sydney’s size; it’s over twice the size of Vancouver but I think the bigger problem for me is a lack of…visible escape. In Vancouver, even in the midst of the bulidings downtown, you can always spot the North Shore mountains – I miss the sense of comfort those mountains provide. In the parts of Sydney I spend most of my time you can’t see any mountains (not that there are any REAL mountains around anyway) just more buildings and highways. All this is a way for me to say that it was GREAT to get out of the city for a day and go on a nice hike in the lethal Australian bush.

Once we got to the park we made our way to Bobbin Head. We left the car there and hiked up to the “discovery centre.” The hike was nice although not the best for views. Before venturing into the park I looked up on the park website what wildlife we might encounter on our hike and the following caught my eye:

Venomous snakes include the death adder, red-bellied black snake and brown snake.

Great! At least three snakes cane seriously maim me! A quick look on Wikipedia followed:

The death adders are a group of three or five species of snakes native to the Australian continent. They are some of the most poisonous snakes in the world… Along with superb camouflage, this renders them nearly invisible to both predator and prey alike.

And people freak out about bears in Canada. At least you can SEE the bear when it eats you. I’ll take a bear over a snake any day. And what about this little paragraph under the “invertebrates” header on the parks website:

Around 100 species of butterfly and moth have been found in the park, which protects a rich diversity of invertebrate life. The Sydney funnelweb spider – Australia’s deadliest – is also an inhabitant. So is the rare freshwater crayfish Euastacus australasiensis.

Is it just me, or are they just trying to sneak that little tidbit of info in there? Of course those spiders could be living under our house so they didn’t really concern me.

We survived our hike up to the discovery centre with the closest brush to death coming at the hands of the powerlines we walked under at one point. BUT BUT BUT….

At the discovery centre we did see some kangaroos and wallabies! Sure they weren’t in the wild, but since we could walk into their large enclosure (which was pretty much just a fence put up around a couple acres of park land) I could pretend they were real wildlife. After we harassed the roos with our cameras for a while Amanda and I trekked back down to the car and drove back to the city. The road out of the park (Bobbin Head Road) was actually really nice and reminded me of some streets in Vancouver. And fall is here…a few trees here were turning red and gold. Now if only the damn possums outside our apartment would shut up…I like nature, but not annoying nature.