King Charles joked Monday about past encounters with Australia’s formidable wildlife — brown snakes, leeches, funnel web spiders and bull ants. He did not mention being sneezed on by a nine-year-old suit-wearing alpaca named Hephner.
The 75-year-old British royal visited Canberra, the capital of his Australian realm, where he joked with lawmakers about his time at a rural grammar school called Timbertop.
He attended the alpine school in southeast Australia in the 1960s as a gawky 17-year-old and recalled the experience as being transformational.
“All I can say is that I arrived as an adolescent and left as a more rounded, if not even somewhat chiselled, character once I had contended with brown snakes, leeches, funnel web spiders and bull ants,” he said to laughs.
What he did not tell the crowd was he had recently had another character-forming encounter with an Australian animal.
Greeting supporters on a rope line at the Australian War Memorial, Charles stopped to admire a sartorially suave alpaca that was wearing a gold crown and suit.
He reached out to “Hephner”, as the woolly camelid is known, and gave him a quick rub on the nose.
However, that caused Hephner to sneeze all over the king and his bodyguard who was also in the line of fire.
“Bless you” someone said from the fray, before Charles checked his right lapel for any trace of Hephner’s expulsive tribute.
It is not the first time Charles has encountered an alpaca as king.
Last year he met an (unclothed) alpaca at an agricultural show in Wales.