Sand Surfing and Wallabies

On the second day in Perth, Courtney's mom had the great idea to drive out to a sand dune about 2 hours away to go sand surfing. It was a blast! The sand was nice and soft, good stuff to fall in, so we decided to do that a lot. The day was great and sunny, but not too hot, so we didn't have to worry about overheating sand. Nothing feels more overwhelming than a magma hot sand dune.

As you can see from the pictures, we tried a mix of snowboarding-eque maneuvers mixed with sledding. The snowboarding was tough, as the nose of the board would often bury in the sand, causing you to get launched off. Sledding was much easier, and, honestly, just as much fun.

This was the advanced hill that we worked up to by the end of the day. We started on the bunny hill of course. 

Pretty steep stuff!

The family. Thanks Courtney for letting me wear your hat. My scalp thanks you for it too. 

This is a video of Drew almost running over Courtney, who is filming. 

This is a film of Drew attempting the large hill. He was the only one brave enough to try it standing. At the bottom, if you look closely, he unknowingly hits a jump!

This is a film of me trying and failing. 

And, finally, a video of Courtney trying and failing. There was lots of sand in that car afterwards. 

After the sand surfing, we stopped at a national park on the way home. The park was full of wallabies, and several were moms carrying their joeys. SO cute!

Mama eats, baby eats. 

We also saw a lot of young males trying to assert themselves in the group, by boxing! There were several techniques used. The first is to aim a punch at your opponent's head, while simultaneously leaning your head back to protect it from your opponent's punch. 

The second technique is to kick with both feet. This was very impressive, because while kicking, they used their tail as a literal third leg (not the figurative third leg) to support themselves. If you look at the wallaby on the right, his tail is totally supporting him mid-kick. Crazy!

 We also got to see a very photogenic koala bear. We noticed that koalas are very similar to panda bears. They just sit in one spot and eat ALL day, making them seem very lazy. Both are very picky eaters. Koalas only eucalyptus leaves, pandas only bamboo. And they only live in particular areas. Pandas-China. Koalas-Australia.

It's hard to see, but the koala is in the tree behind us.