A bystander quickly said, ‘Bless you’, while Charles checked his lapel for any remnants of the alpaca’s sneeze.
Britain’s King Charles shared some lighthearted stories on Monday about his past encounters with Australia’s wildlife, including brown snakes, leeches, funnel web spiders, and bull ants.
However, he left out one amusing recent incident involving a nine-year-old alpaca named Hephner.
During a visit to Canberra, the 75-year-old monarch reminisced with lawmakers about his time at Timbertop, a rural grammar school in southeast Australia, which he attended as a 17-year-old. He described the experience as life-changing, saying, “I arrived as an adolescent and left as a more rounded, if not somewhat chiselled, character after dealing with brown snakes, leeches, and other creatures.”
What he didn’t mention was an encounter with Hephner, an alpaca dressed in a suit and wearing a gold crown, that happened earlier at the Australian War Memorial. Charles reached out to pet Hephner, only to be sneezed on by the well-dressed animal, covering both the king and his bodyguard. A bystander quickly said, “Bless you,” while Charles checked his lapel for any remnants of the alpaca’s sneeze.
Cheese-powered cars to chatting with plants
The rest of the day was dedicated to issues the monarch deeply cares about, like conservation and climate change.
King Charles, a lifelong environmentalist, was once considered a bit eccentric for his green efforts. He even had an Aston Martin DB6 converted to run on ethanol made from leftover cheese and wine. He also once admitted to talking to plants to help them grow.
Charles visited a specially designed lab at Australia’s public science agency. The lab is used by scientists to study the bushfires that frequently devastate large parts of the country.
During his visit, he activated the “pyrotron,” a 29-metre (95-foot) long combustion wind tunnel created to analyse how bushfires behave.
Later, he walked through sections of native flowers at the Australian National Botanic Gardens. He talked about how climate change threatens Australia’s unique plant species.
NOW READ: King Charles just a sideshow in Oz
