The Bower and The Chickies

Today Ruth, Zappa and I went to place called the Bower to snorkel. It's a nature reserve and it's on the same bit of coast as Manly beach, which you can see in the background of this photo. I went and dipped my foot in the water and decided in rather Bahamian fashion that de water freezan!! I no gon inair! I left snorkelling to the others.

It's got a seawater swimming pool which looked more hopeful from a warm-enough perspective. I asked the people sunning themselves by it what it was like, and they said it was lovely. I dipped my foot in. They were liars.

So Woodford and I stayed on the ledge and enjoyed watching Zappa walk like a duck.

I saw a big lizard by a bench. It had just quite suddenly eaten a small lizard.

I hope my neck doesn't look like that one day. Must keep slapping on the sunscreen. Luckily Zap and I have just bought a 1litre pump action container of it.

On the way back from snorkelling we popped into a surf shop to ask directions to a dive shop so we could buy some gear of our own, and the guy pulled out a load of fins and mask sets. Convenient. Zap picked a set in about 30 seconds, I tried on every single pair in the shop and couldn't find any to fit on account of the bizarre and infuriating shape of my feet.

Next and introduction to the chicks! Look at their cute house.

They're a bit stupid, they haven't got the 'going to bed' thing down yet but they've never had a mum to show them how to do things so I suppose you can't expect much general knowledge from them.