Maleny

We’d just about exhausted all the possibilities of Noosa. On our final day, we drove down to Maleny to go to the Botanic Gardens and Bird World. After buying tickets to the next tour in half an hour, the first order of business was to get covered in birds!

Covered in birds!

These birds are tame, and an experienced handler decorates you with them. Once on, they stay pretty much where they’re put. Many of them are recovery birds so not able to be released into the wild, or even integrated into the general population in the aviary.

Inside the aviary, our guide told us what birds he had and how to behave around them. In particular, make sure you look where you’re going so you don’t step on one on the ground! The first house contained smaller birds – finches, some varieties of pigeon, and others. The next cage was the parrots, cockatoo, macaws etc – many of whom would land on you, sometimes without warning. One of them was very interested in my backpack and travelled around with me for a while.

 

After that we wandered around the botanic gardens for a bit before spurning the rather basic offerings of the café to find something more suiting to our needs in the town of Maleny. This we found in an Italian restaurant who were able to supply us with caesar salads. We carried on down to the airport, dropped off the car and awaited our flight. We’d needed something substantial for lunch as our flight times and arrangements left us with little dining time when we arrived in Sydney. As it was, the flight was delayed a further hour, so by the time we arrived we just wanted to get to the hotel and go to bed.