More reasons why I love Australia

 My friend Maik has pointed out that of the 10 reasons I gave 6 where dealing with food and 2 with money. He remarked that this tells you a lot about my character. I think I have to work on my reputation here and want to give you some more reasons why I love Australia - and these have nothing to do with neither food nor money....

Kangaroos: I have spent most of my life believing that Skippy is just a big Hollywood scheme. Here I had to discover that there really are kangaroos (and lots of them), that they really do have pouches and that the kangaroo babies (called joeys) are really carried around in these pouches. It is all true! No Hollywood lie! On the Bibb Track you come thru some places with tame kangaroos so I had plenty of time to study them. The most interesting thing is a joey jumping into its mother's pouch. It jumps in head first and then rearranges itself with something that looks like a sort of yoga excercise until it happily looks out of the pouch. Kangaroos in the wild are usually pretty shy and immediately run away. Most Australians consider them as a pest and they love eating kangaroo steaks - something I have not tried out yet. Long live Skippy!

Birds: If this goes on like that I will turn into a birdnut! First of all there are emus. Again I had believed for most of my life that emus do only exist in crosswords - but they are really here. They are birds but they cannot fly - and they are huge, too. And dumb. And pretty emancipated: The male emu tends to the babies so that the female can go on and have more babies instead of rearing them. Pretty clever..
Then there are cuckatoos. They make a hell lot of noise and look pretty exotic. When they appear in a huge flock then you immediately think of Hitchcock's 'The Birds'...
But best are the parrots. Real parrots just out here. Not escaped from a zoo - they really do live here. They are bright green - just like in bird food ads...
Talking about ads: Along the coast there are hundreds of pelicans which I thought only exist in ink advertising (this is something only the Germans will understand). But here they are live...

Beaches: After I hiking the PCT I was spoilt rotten regarding mountain scenery - and after hiking the Bibb Track I am spoilt rotten when it comes to beaches. The beaches here are just incredibly. I have not seen anything like that before. Picture white soft sand beach for kilometers, crystal blue sea and an even bluer sky with sunshine forever. Just like Bacardi rum ads withouth palmtrees. There are no beaches like that in Europe - and if there were, there would be thousands of people. Here there is nobody. Absolutely nobody. Perfect beach and nobody there. I was almost scared at first. There are some people close to resorts and caravan parks but mostly there is nobody. Unbelievable.