Wild Dragons, Echidnas, and Dolphins!

Australian water dragons, that is:

He blends in well, doesn't he? 

And we were lucky enough to see a second one:

See that long tail? The water dragons we saw were about 2.5 feet long. You can learn all about them here.

On Easter Sunday (after an Anglican service that turned out to be more pop culture than high church) Rick, Sylvia, and I saw these water dragons when we were hiking around the North Head -- the northern peninsula separating the Sydney harbor area from the sea. To get there, we took a ferry, walked past Manly & Shelly beaches and then started walking on one of the trails.













Our huge thrill of the day was seeing an echidna, close up, in the wild busily eating ants.

Look at his quills. You can see the ones with broken tips are hollow. 

And later in the day we saw another echidna! A local we talked to was very surprised we'd seen any and said they're rare in the area. He also said they've become more generally threatened by domesticated dogs.

And here's the echidna in action:

I love watching him suck up those speedy - but not speedy enough! - ants.

At one point, we had a break a hole through the wall to keep following the path. Not really, but that's what it looks like, right? There was no information about what this wall was from, but we guessed it might have been from an old military building.

We also saw a rather large skink.

Skinks are lizards that we see everywhere -- in the garden or on the sidewalk zipping into a crevice as we approach. The ones we usually see are a couple inches long. This one was huge -- about eight inches.

Here's a link about skinks. (I think that's my new favorite rhyme. It sounds like it should be in a Dr. Seuss book).

This section of the trail went through an area that was regrowing after a fire.













And here's a grass tree:

   Isn't it an interesting looking plant?

The trail went by the Third Quarantine Cemetery which was established in 1881 for victims of smallpox. Also buried there are victims of the bubonic plague of 1900 and the 1918 influenza as well as some World War I servicemen. It's a beautiful spot.

We picnicked at a lookout spot with this view:

You can see the light house on the South Head, and you can get a sense of how enormous the cruise ships are that dock in Sydney. (We have fondly dubbed the very tall tower on the right "the marshmallow building" because it kind of looks like a marshmallow on a stick).

Here's the trail illuminated by the setting sun as we walked back to Manly:

 Check out the bark on that tree.

We had to walk by this monster with its gaping jaw-of-death. Quite the rock formation, isn't it?

More evening light.

And, as you can tell, I can finally upload videos again, so I'm including a clip from the dolphins that we saw in 

Shoal Bay. According to the captain of the ship, they like playing with the "pressure wave" at the front of the boat. If the captain hadn't told us that, I would have been afraid they would have been run over. The dolphins are literally right in front of the boat. Enjoy!