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| Panorama of Canberra from the Telstra Tower |
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| Closing ceremony at the Australian War Memorial |
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| Looking toward the Parliament building in Canberra |
Canberra is a beautiful city with more traffic circles than
I’ve ever seen in on city—and that’s saying a lot for Australia. They are
justifiably in love with traffic circles! And so are we; so much better than a
stop sign or traffic light at an intersection. Traffic slows at a circle but
doesn’t have to stop (most of the time, anyway). How great is that!
The drive from Ballarat to Canberra is fairly long, about
seven hours, but on good roads so we arrived in Canberra about 1600 and went to
the Australian War Memorial. So many people told us about that museum that we
knew we just had to go there. We figured we couldn’t possibly see it in an hour
but we’d get the flavor of it and go back the next day if it interested us
enough. The AWM had a wonderful special exhibit on nurses in wartime, from the
beginning of the Australian Army Nursing Service in the early 1900s up to the
present day. As a nurse myself, I appreciated the thought that went into the
exhibit. The AWM also has a moving closing ceremony at the end of the day at
the Memorial, the playing of The Last Post, the Aussie equivalent of our Taps.
A very nice dinner at La Rustica capped our long driving
day. When we woke the next morning, it was to a clear blue sky; absolutely, as
the Aussies say, a brilliant day! So we didn’t want to spend the day inside so
elected not to go back to the AWM but to go instead to the Botanic Gardens and
to the Zoo. What great choices we made!
Since we seem to travel on our stomachs, first we had to
have a Sunday breakfast. We found a delightful little—very little, only about
10 tables not counting the ones in the hall (!) and outside—restaurant, the
Farmer’s Daughter. It was in the low 20sC, we think, so pretty cold outside,
but they provided a nice basket with blankets for those hardy enough or hungry
enough to not want to wait for an inside table. We got there soon enough to get
an inside table, thank goodness!
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| Telstra Tower |
Then it was on to the Telstra Tower for an absolutely
fabulous
brilliant view of Canberra from 870
meters (ASL). What a gorgeous day! Then on to the Botanic Gardens; there seems
to be an argument as to whether it is the Botanic or the Botanical Gardens, but
no matter it was quite interesting to see all the local flora. The fauna would
come later at the zoo. Not terribly much was in bloom other than the wattles
(much prettier than their name) and the banksias and some orchids in the
“glasshouse” which is what the Aussies call a greenhouse. A lot of the Aussie
flora is so different from ours that I couldn’t resist taking pictures! As
always, I get lots of ideas from other institutions: They have a volunteer who
organizes a list of what’s in bloom, prints a flyer, and then puts signs out on
the grounds keyed to the flyer.
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| This is the sign that gets hung by the blooming plants at the Botanical Garden; the number corresponds to the number on the list of "What's in bloom" that is generated by a volunteer each week |
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| This is the backside of the sign, showing how it is hung on a hook staked in the ground |
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| Look closely and you can see the sign in place by a blooming plant. |
But the absolute best, most fabulous, wonderful, splendid, awesome,
fun, you-name-the-adjective part of the day was to come at the
National Zoo
and Aquarium. One of the ways the National Zoo and
Aquarium makes money is offering several
keeper tours. One is “
Meet
a Cheetah” where you have “A very rare opportunity to pat and play with one
or more big cats” for approximately $165pp. Another, which Randy and I did, is
the “
Ultimate
Zooventure Tour,” “2 hours of fun and adrenalin pumping excitement; hand
feed lions, tigers, cougar, giraffes and snow leopards, [and] have a 400kg
brown bear lick honey from your hand!” $135 and worth every penny although I
would dispute the “adrenaline pumping” part of it, the tour was very mild
although fascinating.
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| One of the many species of Banksias that were in bloom |
We were escorted by Kim, a part-time keeper (although she
has been a keeper for over seven years) who put me on the spot (after I told
her I was a docent at the
Arizona-Sonora
Desert Museum) at the feeding of the mountain lions. Yes, they have
Felis concolor, and no, I couldn’t teach
them anything but I didn’t embarrass myself either! However, I couldn’t answer
her one big question to me, “How endangered are the puma in the US and Mexico?”
While not “adrenaline pumping” it was way cool to actually
feed a Bengal and a Sumatran tiger. Not to mention feeding white lions (Panthera leo). I was so pleased to hear,
at each stop to feed an animal, a conservation message from Kim. Part of the
way through the “tour” we were joined by a trainee keeper, Stacey, who was almost
as good as Kim. Our total experience included feeding otters (they got the most
delicious-looking prawns!), giraffes, elands (I didn’t make any points by
saying eland tasted pretty good), dingoes, and handling a Boa constrictor as well as feeding the
aforementioned carnivores.
As a docent rather than just a zoo visitor I thought about a
lot of issues to do with what the National Zoo does on these tours. The animals
are wild animals and the Meet a Cheetah adventure seems (we didn’t do this one)
to make the animals seem like pets and I have a problem with that. On the other
hand, all zoos have financial problems and if they have found a way to support
the zoo and make money at the same time, good for them. The tour we did, I
thought, hit all the right points: safety and conservation while maintaining a
“fun” atmosphere and making money all at the same time!
And, I learned a lot. It was a small tour—they can handle 11
at once and will put on a second tour if there are more than 11—only five of us,
a really nice number of people. We were, no surprise, the only Americans. I
learned, for example, that zebras kill more keepers than any other zoo animal
except elephants. She told us that everything eats zebras so they are very
skittish about anything that moves and a lot that doesn’t move. Thus, even
though the zebras and elands live together, they discourage the zebras from
coming to be fed when the elands do; the keepers just don’t want the zebras to
interact with people unless absolutely necessary. Because I volunteer at a zoo
I was very interested in how they use their volunteers: completely behind the
scenes because, as Kim said, “We can’t have them leading tours because we can’t
expect a volunteer to show up on time when a tour is scheduled!”
I learned that white lions are just regular lions, Panthera leo, and thus share their
merely “vulnerable” status even though they are extinct in the wild. And that
dingo DNA is probably in every dog because, as Kim said, “They will mate with
anything that goes “woof.” A pure dingo is extremely rare. And I learned that a
giraffe’s tongue is very strong; he was able to pull the carrot from my hand
even though I resisted. And a bear’s tongue is very soft; I expected a rough
tongue similar to a cat’s. We always had to feed the dominant animal otherwise
feeding the non-dominant animal would upset the balance that they had settled
on and cause lots of problems for the keepers as well as the animals.
We couldn’t touch the tigers (or any of the animals but the
eland and boa); we had to feed them the meat using ordinary kitchen tongs. Fine
with me, I could see the size of those teeth! Bengals are very large, Sumatrans
are pretty small but they both looked huge to me! To feed the bear Kim smeared
a very sticky substance on the palm of my hand and I held my hand flat at the
edge of the enclosure for her to lick; she was supremely uninterested. She did
a couple of desultory licks and then pretty much gave up licking.
All in all it was a most rewarding afternoon (almost three
hours) for the five of us both emotionally and educationally and for the zoo
financially (they got about $675 with almost no cost other than the salary of
the keeper and a minimum amount for the food which the animals would get anyway).
The ZooVenture has to be one of the big highlights of our
trip!
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| Koalas will only eat about 60-70 of the several hundred species of eucalyptus that exist in Australia; they can tell what's edible by sniffing the base of the tree. |
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| The otter and his scrumptious-looking prawn. They scarfed up about four prawns each that we fed them. |
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| Pam feeding the Bengal tiger. That's keeper Kim at the right. |
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| Randy feeding the Bengal tiger. He is quite old but seems to enjoy doing what cats do, eat and sleep. He was sound asleep when she called him for his "feeding" by us tour participants |
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| The male White Lion. He wouldn't let the female eat! |
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| The eland was the only animal (other than the dingo) that we were allowed to touch. |
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| Feeding the giraffe was probably the most fun. |
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| The Brothers Giraffe; the pattern on each giraffe is unique. |
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| Randy, Kim, and one of the dingos. |
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| The Sumatran tiger feeding wasn't technically part of the tour but Kim had extra meat; that's Stacey, a keeper who joined us part-way through the tour. |
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| Stacey, Randy, and the Boa |
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| Stacey, Pam and the Boa who, by this time was getting a bit tired of moving from person to person. He likes to stay in one place. |
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Pam, doing what she did the whole tour of the
Botanical Garden, taking pictures. |
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| Another Banksia. |
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| Dendrobium fimbriatum |
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| Dendrobium thrisiflorum |
Our wonderful trip is now almost over. We are leaving on
United #870 on Sept 11—I hope it’s not ominous that we are flying on 9/11! We
left home on May 2 and will return home on Sept 14, almost exactly four and a
half months. That’s probably the longest we have ever been gone from home. We
visited 26 countries and 40 cities over 104 days. We have travelled about
25,000 miles on planes, trains, and automobiles as well as ships and boats. We
probably came close to at least seeing most of the 1950 passengers on board the
Sun Princess and didn’t come close to seeing even a small fraction of the staff
who took care of us for 104 days. I don’t even want to think about how much
money we spent, but it was worth every penny to meet the wonderful people we
met and to see the beautiful and fascinating sights and sites that we saw.
Would I do it again? In a New York minute! But probably not next year, we have
other trips to plan—perhaps to Europe, perhaps around South America or perhaps we’ll
even stay home and enjoy our house and our cabin. Or, hmmmhhhh, it’s been ten
years since we drove to Alaska!
