Ted Wilson Reviews the World: Kangaroo Rides

★☆☆☆☆

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing kangaroo rides.

Earlier this year I won a free trip to Australia. Unfortunately when I arrived at the airport with all my bags, I learned that the $350 processing fee I’d paid for my free trip was part of a scam and there was no free trip. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t take a trip of my own, and since I was already at the airport, I figured why not.

When I landed in Sydney I went straight to the zoo and asked about the Kangaroo rides. It turns out that was also part of the scam. The zoo said there is no such thing. What a disappointment. I thought I could just capture and ride a kangaroo myself but there are no wild kangaroos in downtown Sydney. I did find their version of the pigeon which is much prettier than America’s. Theirs is a white ibis. Ours just has stumps for feet.

I went to the suburbs to look for kangaroos to ride. In addition to buses, Sydney also has boats. In Boston the only boats are ones you have to peddle yourself and they only go in circles in a pond. In Sydney they go all over, so I took one to Balmain. I found a dead possum and lots of adorable little streets, but couldn’t find any kangaroos. Not even with the kangaroo caller I’d paid that scam artist $49.99 for. The only thing it seemed to call was giant spiders. They were everywhere.

All this searching made me so tired and I worried that once I found a kangaroo, I wouldn’t have the physical stamina to ride it. I decided to sign up for some Zumba classes to get some exercise. In Sydney, their Zumba classes are a pastry shop called Zumbo, and instead of exercising you eat lots of incredibly delicious pastries. It was the best exercise class I’ve ever taken. I exercised on the bench outside their shop for over an hour.

The clerk at the Zumbo class told me the best place to look for kangaroos was out in the wild, not in Sydney. She also told me there was no way I could ride a kangaroo. I wasn’t sure if that was a comment about my age or a dare. I took that as a challenge and booked a ticket as far away as I could to Darwin.

Darwin is about 80 degrees sweatier than Sydney, so I bought a pair of shorts, a tank top, didn’t bother with underwear, and took a bus out to the woods to begin my kangaroo search. I positioned myself behind a mound of dirt and waited patiently for a kangaroo to show up. The heat made me drowsy and after drifting off I woke up to find that the mound of dirt was a termite mound, and that the termites were now all over me.

I screamed and ran so fast through the woods that I was quickly lost. Being lost in the Australian wild is not very much fun. Even if I found a kangaroo and rode it, I would have still been too anxious about getting home to enjoy the ride.

Out of desperation, I began eating ants. It turns out Australian ants have delicious, citrus-flavored, lime green butts. I don’t know if ants poop out of their butts like most animals, but I didn’t care.

The authorities eventually picked me up after a friendly Aboriginal family found me, gave me water, and fed me a goose. On the ride back to the airport I saw a kangaroo off in the distance and I asked the police officer to pull over so I could ride it. She told me that was not a kangaroo in the distance but a wallaby close up. A wallaby is a miniature kangaroo. I remembered that from the wallaby burger I’d eaten in Sydney.

BEST FEATURE: Kangaroo rides leave a lot to the imagination.
WORST FEATURE: Kangaroo rides are impossible.

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing spider bites.