Taronga Zoo!

Taronga Zoo

After arriving in Sydney, we visited Taronga Zoo.  Taronga Zoo sits on the far side of the harbour slightly east of the Opera House and as such has amazing views over the Sydney Harbour and the Bridge. It has over 4,000 animals of 340 different species and is a lovely walk around for a day. It's also the second zoo in Australia to successfully breed, and display, an animal that has been extremely elusive to us in Queensland as we searched for it - the platypus!

This is a Lace monitor lizard - the second largest lizard in Australia and absolutely enormous, up to 7 foot in length. We saw a few of these in the wild, notably in Noosa and Byron Bay.

The view over the harbour from the zoo

A mountain goat, making the most of an artificial mountain

A baby chimpanzee, looking directly at me.

Snoozy chimp

Giraffe

This guy is a Fennec Fox. A tiny little fox with huge ears - and extremely cute.

Meerkats

A very large Tapir

Tiger, posing as best it could!

Gorilla and baby gorilla!

The seal during the show. It's crazy how intelligent seals are.

Sun bears

Alpha-lion

Lioness came to see what we were doing! Gave us a great shot!

Baby gorilla - it was alarmingly human in the way it behaved

Aisan Elephant

Hairy-nosed Southern wombat! Wombats are our new favourite Aussie animal. They're great!

An emu. These are everywhere here. We've driven past a few and a couple have ran across the road in front of us.

The cutest little thing - I can't remember what it is though!

This is a common wombat, and they are the cutest animals in Australia, even more so than Koalas!

A very large and enormously muscular Grey Kangaroo. Over 6 foot tall, you don't want to get on the wrong side of one, or hit it with your car.

A red kangaroo. A bit smaller than the grey.

A very sleepy Tasmanian devil!