Werribee Zoo & Altona Beach

This past weekend, the Wife and I decided to go visit the Werribee Open Range Zoo.  It was a long trek for us to get there.  We left home at 8 am, caught the train into the city, changed to the Werribee line and went all the way to the terminus, Werribee station.  Then, we caught a bus from the station to the entrance of the zoo.  We reached there around 10:45 am, and got our entrance tickets which included a 45 min guided tour of the zoo in an open bus.

The Werribee Zoo is an open range zoo, about 500 acres in area, with basically little or no fences for the animals on display.  We chose to go on the non-airconditioned bus, so that we would have open windows and be able to take nice pictures.  The tour took us through several areas supposed to replicate the grasslands of North America, Asia and Africa, and we encountered bison, antelopes, camels, rhinos, zebras, giraffes and buffaloes en route at very close proximity.  In particular, Tony the pure-bred giraffe came right up to our bus to say hello!  It was quite a novel sight to see a 4 m giraffe from about a metre away!!  We were also informed that some of the rhinos had, in the past, attacked tour vehicles and broken windshields.  Thankfully, these massive creatures were rather well-behaved during our tour!

Once we completed the bus tour, we made a quick pit-stop for lunch and then began the first of three walking trails.  The first trail we did was a wetlands trail and we saw some marshes and swamps and the Watersmart garden, which was a beautiful garden designed to minimize water consumption.  Quite an important thing for Victoria because it is the one of the driest places in the world, and we are in the midst of rather severe water shortages.  Then, we did the Pula Reserve trail where we got to see Vervet Monkeys, Lions, Meerkats, Hippos, Cheetahs, Zebras and Ostriches.  The Cheetahs, in particular, were the highlight as we got to see them at a distance of roughly two metres!!!  Honestly, the Lions were bit of a disappointed because they were simply sleeping meekly in the shade, largely due to the sweltering mid-day (it topped 32 deg C!).

Then, we took a short ice-cream break at the Hippo area to get some respite from the heat before proceeding to do the last trail, the Volcanic Plains trail.  This was a short trail, but we were in the midst of Emus and Kangaroos the whole time.  Completely free!  It was awesome, particularly because it was our first encounter with Kangaroos since we moved to Australia!!!  I was particularly thrilled to get a nice picture and video of a Kangaroo in the "Qantas" pose, i.e. hopping away!


All in all, it was a novel visit to the zoo for both of us since we had not been to an open zoo such as this before!  We were done around 3 pm and decided to head back to Werribee station on the 3 pm bus.  As we were waiting for the bus, the Wife realized that she was missing her purse!!  After a brief panic attack, we decided to check with the Customer Service counter if we could be allowed back into the zoo to search for he purse.  Luckily, it turned out that someone had found the Wife's purse on the tour bus and had given it to Customer Service for safekeeping!  We let out a huge sigh of relief, thanked the lady at the counter profusely before catching our bus back to the station.


On the way back from Werribee, we decided to do a slight detour and got off at Altona station to go and see the Altona Beach, which was barely 200 m from the train station.  It was a nice beach, packed with people sunbathing, fishing and swimming!  It felt like summer had well and truly arrived!!!  We had a short, lazy walk along the beach, too tired to venture into the water, and then headed back to the train station for the ride back home.  We reached home around 6:30 pm, after picking up some dinner along the way as well.  Tired, but satisfied with the sights and sounds we had seen all day long, we went to bed early and slept very well.  You can find more pictures of our first real summer day out here.