Furiously Happy (21 page)

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Laura and I thought about leaving traps all over Australia (cardboard boxes propped up by sticks with babies inside of them) to see if we could catch dingoes but then Laura pointed out that it was probably BYOB (Bring Your Own Baby) and I never even remember to pack phone chargers, so we just crossed that one out. We asked if Greg from
The Wiggles
could drive us around in the Big Red Car and the Australian tourism board seemed a little hesitant so instead we decided to make things easier for them by keeping it simple.

Goal Number 1: Hug a Koala While Dressed as a Koala

I planned to dress as a koala so that koalas would know what it's like to be held by a koala because turnabout is fair play. Except, honestly, they probably just want you to put them down. People are constantly picking them up without asking first. Koalas are the new dwarves. Just because they're smaller than you, it doesn't give you the right to pick them up without asking. But that doesn't mean I don't want to go to a reserve where there are tons of them and rake them up in a pile and jump on them like they're a furry leaf pile. (Koalas, that is. Not dwarves.) Not that I would jump on piles of koalas
or
dwarves. Sometimes we're made from the stuff that we want to do but don't actually follow through on. Like when someone is an asshole and you want to burn down their garage, but then you don't because it's illegal and also because you can't find the matches. I'm made from a lot of unfulfilled arson. And un-jumped-on koala piles.

I told Laura that I was tempted to make a koala fall in love with me so I that could sneak it home in my backpack, but she pointed out that I didn't even bring a backpack. I am a terrible planner.

“Maybe I should dress like a eucalyptus tree because they really like to hang on them and it'll put them at ease,” I said. “And then I'll rub Vicks VapoRub all over me because I think menthol and eucalyptus are pretty much the same thing. And I'll give them menthol cigarettes to smoke. Those fucking koalas are going to
love
me.”

Laura agreed. “I read that they're all slothy and out of it because the eucalyptus they eat is full of poisons and so they spend their whole lives trying to digest toxins. They probably
do
want saving. They eat toxic shit all day. Someone needs to give them a steak to chew on.”

“Or some pound cake and a multivitamin,” I added.

“Plus, tons of them have chlamydia. Luckily koala chlamydia is not contagious to people though,” Laura added.

“Huh. Does it feel like human chlamydia?” I asked.

“I dunno. I've never had human chlamydia,” she replied.

Laura can be a real braggart sometimes.

The more I considered it, the more I realized how much I have in common with these koalas. We're both immunocompromised, lightly diseased, exhausted, and full of toxins. I'm totally a koala.

“I'm more of a kangaroo,” Laura replied after a moment of thought. “I'm laid-back until you push me a bit too far and then I'll split your stomach open and walk away while you bleed to death.”

“And that's why I keep on your good side,” I said. “I'm also a Hufflepuff because I'm lactose intolerant and I get distracted by birds.”

Laura didn't respond, but in her defense, it was a lot to take in.

My hopes of smuggling a live koala out of the country were significantly dampened though when it took the koala wranglers two weeks just to approve my koala costume because they were afraid that the fleecy costume would terrify and startle the koalas. It finally got approved, but then when we got to the Sydney zoo we were told that we were not on the list and were certainly not going to be holding any of their koalas. Possibly the koala costume threw them off. I explained that we'd specifically been told we could come here to snuggle koalas and that my outfit had been approved weeks in advance and they looked at me in a way that made me think that they'd called security. (I am
way
too familiar with that look.) We pulled out our paperwork and they sighed in relief when they told us that we'd come to the wrong place and that we wanted the Wild Life Sydney Zoo, which is not the same thing as the Sydney zoo
.

“
Just how many zoos do you people need?
” I asked.

“They only recently started calling themselves a zoo, so it's confusing to people,” the clerk explained. “Catch the bus back and ask the driver to take you to the aquarium.”

“Awesome,” Laura said. “We're going to hold a bunch of aquatic koalas. I didn't even know those existed.”

“They
don't
exist,” replied the clerk.

“Great,” I replied. “Then we get to hold a bunch of drowned koalas. This isn't
quite
the day I expected.”

Thirty minutes later we made it to the right spot and found that the zoo was part of an aquarium and wax museum conglomerate and was nice but fairly tiny compared to the zoo we'd just been thrown out of. We found our way to a koala enclosement. (Spell-check says “koala enclosement” isn't a real thing and it wants me to change it to “koala enslavement.” Clearly spell-check feels
very
strongly about koalas in captivity. Victor says “enclosement” is not a real word, but I just put it in a book so it's a real word now, Victor.)

I told the people working there that I was there to hold a koala and they looked at me as if I'd said I was there to hack the limbs off tiny babies. Turns out it's been illegal to hold a koala in that particular part of Australia for years, but I wasn't giving up because they'd already approved my costume so they must've known we were there to nuzzle koalas. They called management and found that I was actually only approved to
wear
the koala costume while staring at the koalas.

I tried to politely argue my way into holding them but they told me that even David Hasselhoff had only been allowed to stand near them and that's when I gave up, because if the Hoff can't love on a koala I sure as hell wasn't going to get to. And I suppose they had good reason to be protective of their koalas since clearly someone had given a great number of them chlamydia. But then again if they're all rampant with chlamydia already it's not like they're going to get
more
chlamydia. If anything they should be concerned about their koalas giving
me
chlamydia, but I was willing to take that chance because I really wanted to say I'd held a koala and also because I was pretty sure there were shots to cure chlamydia now. Surprisingly, this argument only baffled the koala keepers but they were very sweet and apologetic for the disappointment and did agree to let me go into the enclosure to photobomb a koala.

Not
quite
as romantic as I was hoping for, but at least the koala wasn't overly panicked when he saw me. He looks terrified, doesn't he? Answer: No, he doesn't.
Because he's fucking asleep.
I suspected they were all high on quaaludes and I was a little jealous. I probably could have drawn a Sharpie mustache on him and he still would've stayed in whatever crazy fever dream koalas have.

I think the lesson here is that you shouldn't get your hopes up about holding koalas, but technically they smell weird and tons of them have chlamydia so maybe this was the universe's way of saving me from myself. Or from chlamydia.

*   *   *

(Note: I have several friends who went to the parts of Australia where you can still hold a koala and they all said that it was sweet but that the koalas are very heavy and a bit stinkier than you'd expect. They suggested that if you really want to hold a koala but can't, just get a furry pillowcase and fill it with lightly used cat litter. Or tie a bunch of sedated raccoons together. Or maybe hold a dead koala. I probably should have asked, “Do you have any koalas that are already dead from the shock of being cuddled? Because we're fine with that. We're not picky.
Unlike these fucking koalas.
” I'm sure that would've gone over well. Now that I think about it, it's possible that the sleeping koalas at the enclosure weren't even sleeping. They were probably taxidermied and they just hot-glued them to a branch. That's probably why you can't even pet them. Because hot glue melts in Australia because it's broiling so often. And that's why you can't jostle dead koalas on trees. They'll just fall right off the trees and then the jig is up.)

Goal Number 2: See the World's Biggest Something

Australia has a love for big things, like the Big Prawn (thirty feet) or the Big Slurpee (thirty-six feet). I wanted to see the Big Banana (forty-three feet). Laura didn't even know that there was such a thing but once she heard about it she wanted to go too. Unfortunately, we were in the wrong part of Australia for most of the Big Things, but we heard rumors on the Internet of a Big Potato, which would only take us a day to find. And so we rented a car so we could drive
many, many
hours so that we could see Australia's Big Potato. Except it isn't actually a potato. It's a cement sculpture in the shape of a potato. It's right by a gas station and when we asked locals where to find it they all said, “
What? You mean the big turd?
”

Apparently it's lovingly(?) referred to as a big turd. A big turd potato.

A poturdo.

It was awesome. I'm not even being sarcastic about this. Just look at it.

(
Courtesy of Laura Mayes
)

It took the two of us working in tandem just to drive to the Poturdo because Australia is filled with roundabouts and everyone drives on the wrong side of the road. In the end we decided to split up the work and I feverishly watched the GPS and yelled, “Left! Right! ROUNDABOUT!” while Laura white-knuckledly followed my instructions and glared at people daring to easily drive on the wrong side of the road. Roundabouts presented the most difficulties. Instead of red lights and yield signs, everyone just drives in a circle until they find the place where they want out. I'm sure there have got to be some sort of rules to this but we didn't know them and so we'd just drive in with our windows down, pointing and screaming, “WE'RE GOING THAT WAY SO PLEASE DON'T HIT US,” to the people in nearby cars. A pile of dogs could have driven better than us.

We never used our blinker properly because in Australia the knob you think is going to be your blinker is the knob that turns on the windshield wiper. So we had almost no driving skills and a windshield wiper that was constantly on
for no reason at all
. I bet rental places in Australia can probably tell when Americans have rented their cars because their windshield wipers always need to be replaced.

Additionally, everything is measured in klicks and meters and liters and neither Laura nor I knew how to convert metric to imperial so when the GPS would show that we needed to turn in two kilometers I'd say, “Be prepared to turn in two minutes or two hours. I don't know which.” Laura looked at me with frustration but she never learned it either so she couldn't say much.

“There's too much math on this vacation,” I complained like a whiny American. “I've gone thirty-nine years without learning the metric system and I'm not gonna pussy out now. If I did it'd be like admitting to Ms. Johnson that I
would
have to use this one day.”

Laura nodded in agreement.

“Fuck it,” I said. “From now on I'm just going to measure everything in babies. Lengthwise. Everyone knows how long a baby is so it's totally universal. The math people will probably be mad about having to convert everything though. This is probably how God felt when people stopped measuring arks in cubits.”

“Or measuring arks at all,” Laura replied.

We eventually drove into the bush, where we were expected to camp for the night. “This place is very bushy,” I said, using words to describe things.