Jack Ashby

Uh, most people go to lay in the deck and we went a bit further South and, uh,

It was fraught with the typical adventure of remote parts of the world where we got there and an avalanche knocked out the road and we were stuck in this tiny village behind the wrong side of the avalanche for the snow leopards for three days.

And eventually someone said, OK, we're driving to the avalanche.

Someone's driving on the other side.

climb over the avalanche and we'll swap cars.

And then we drove back up the mountain and yeah, we saw snow leopards every day.

Every day?

Every day for a week or so.

It was absolutely stunning.

You're looking into the eyes of a snow leopard.

They saw us.

I admit we were separated by a narrow gorge, but there was a mother and two cubs just old enough.

They were just about to leave her, and there was a male prowling around waiting to mate, I think, as soon as the females had got rid of the cubs.

And it was, it's one of those things you just can't believe that you are there with one of the most hard to see animals on earth.

Yeah, exactly that, authority.

They're slinking, they walk through snow with such ease, their feet are huge as kind of snowshoes, and then watching them kind of climb among the rocks in hunt of ibex and blue sheep.

It's just... It kind of makes your hair stand on end.

Yeah, so Hunter was out on the Hawkesbury River near Sydney, and he was watching a Darug man hunting on the water.

And he watched him spear this animal, which Hunter then went on to describe as an amphibious mammal, amphibious animal of the mole kind, which I love.

I love that the earliest English name for platypuses was duck mole.