A dingo will mate with anything that goes “woof”…

Panorama of Canberra from the Telstra Tower

Closing ceremony at the Australian War Memorial

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!

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.

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

This is the backside of the sign, showing how it is hung on a hook staked in the ground

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.

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!

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.

The otter and his scrumptious-looking prawn. They scarfed up about four prawns each that we fed them.

Pam feeding the Bengal tiger. That's keeper Kim at the right.

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

The male White Lion. He wouldn't let the female eat!

The eland was the only animal (other than the dingo) that we were allowed to touch.

Feeding the giraffe was probably the most fun.

The Brothers Giraffe; the pattern on each giraffe is unique.

Randy, Kim, and one of the dingos.

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.

Stacey, Randy, and the Boa

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.

Pam, doing what she did the whole tour of the
Botanical Garden, taking pictures.

Another Banksia.

Dendrobium fimbriatum

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!