We'd had a lovely relaxing time in Melbourne, catching up with friends and family but we knew we needed to crack on with our agricultural days on our limited time frame so after 4 days we got up at ridiculous o'clock and headed to the bus station to go work on a zoo!! We would be wwoofing there until some paid work was ready for us in Mildura, which is working for food and accomodation and also ticking off days for our VISA. We weren't overly keen on this idea to begin with, but we didn't want to waste any more time, and loved the idea of working on a zoo (obvs)!!
After a few hours we arrived to the small town of Mansfield and were picked up by Maddy (a brummy girl currently wwoofing on the zoo) in a huge Mansfield Zoo truck. We fired a million questions her way as we were pretty clueless as to what to expect, and it seemed as though we would be working hard everyday, but would love it. We got to the zoo, and went to drop our stuff in the place we'd be sleeping for the next few weeks, and without being overly dramatic - it was pretty horrendous! The carpet probably had never been hoovered, there was minimal bedding on the bed we were sleeping on, and in general it was a mess! Day reassured me by saying if we didn't like it, we could leave whenever we liked, but we both wanted to stick it out for at least a couple of weeks. But in 3 weeks time, we would be so sad to be leaving and be taking the most amazing memories with us.
We were thrown in at the deep end with our first job being to clean out the chicken hutches and yard (a fortnightly task which we didnt think had been done for at least two months). This is the part of the job which actually counted towards our visa - unfortunately feeding all the animals doesn't count on its own - so within an hour of arriving we were changed into our scruffs and scraping chicken poop off their filthy little houses. We learnt many things during our time at the zoo, the first thing being that chickens poo more than you could ever imagine. It was a bizarre and unglamorous start to zoo life, but all we could do was laugh. 14 days to go. Only 14 days to go...
After the chickens were cleaned out and the eggs collected Maddy gave us a tour of the zoo, which was much bigger than we'd first thought... a lizard, python, aviaries with a range of colourful birds, guinea pigs, spotted quoll, Basil and Cybil the camels, antelope, samba deer, bison, Tim the alligator, duckies, emus, rusa deer, Deli the llama, dingos, albino kangaroo, white lions, wallabies, wombats, monkeys, fallow deer, kangaroos, ferrets, turkeys, cockatoo and cheeky capuchins monkeys. After our stroll round the zoo meeting all the animals, we headed to the shed where Maddy would be showing us what to feed whom on the nightly feed. Our job was to feed most the animals once a day, but some of the animals in the early evening too. All the food the animals ate was donated from local supermarkets, and seriously, those animals ate ridiculously well. We were totally baffled as to why the supermarkets had chucked away half of the stuff that turned up in the truck every day! Avocados, peppers, boxes of fruit, cabbage, lettuce and loads more. This all costs a small fortune in supermarkets over here! And anything that was slightly off would be fed to the less than fussy camels and goats (that STANK)! So after chopping up loads of veg and Maddy assuring us we would get the hang of who to feed, what and when real quick, we headed back into the zoo to go hand feed the capuccin monkeys for the first time. Day was pretty nervous after nearly being attacked in Phi Phi Thailand by a Resus monkey, luckily we had to lock that type of monkey into a different enclosure before feeding them! I think they could sense his nerves as they weren't overly keen on taking anything from him to begin with, but we both managed to feed them a grape and nut, so the first animal feeding encounter was a success! This was followed by meeting and feeding Angel and Solo the dingos, the spotted quoll and ferrets. Our first day's work on the zoo was finished! We'd arrived at 1.30pm but felt like we'd done so much already!! Little did we know there was much more to come.....