Day 56: Dubbo Zoo

Dubbo, is a rural city in New South Wales of around 54,000, and is home to a famous zoo: the Western Plains Zoo. I went there as a child a long time ago. We haven't gone to any zoos for a very long time and it was a bit strange doing it as adults with no kids. David had never been there, so we decided that seeing as we were travelling through, we'd take a day to check it out.

Greater One-Horned Rhinoceros

It’s a large zoo (3 square km), not at all like the little city zoos that most people are more familiar with. Most of the animals have very large areas to roam and they've made an effort to make it closer to how their wild relatives live. There's a circuit of around 5 km that you can drive, walk, or ride around. We took our motorhome and drove. I'm not sure we saved much energy, though, because we also walked over 6 km. Driving meant, though, that we could easily carry our own food and water. We drove, parked, and walked . . . on repeat, several times. I found it a little challenging to orientate myself as we went around!

Map of the zoo.

At one point along the way we met four y.o. Molly, who promptly introduced me to all her family. She's the oldest of three siblings and her mum looked weary. It's easy to see how Molly's opinions were a strong driving force in the family—she didn't hesitate to talk to us, and, I suspect she never hesitates to share her thoughts. I'm sure if we'd hung around we would have heard a lot of things her parents didn't think were appropriate to be sharing with strangers.

We saw three types of rhino. Giraffes, hippo eyes (yep, they were in the water), Tasmanian devils, elephants, wild horses, meerkats, African lions, many birds, wallabies, koalas, etc.There were lots of keeper talks, the challenge was coordinating yourself to get there. We happened upon ones at the hippos and giraffes and actually managed to organised ourselves to hear the Tasmanian Devil and platypus ones.

Meerkats

We also visited the animal hospital late in the day, and read many signs there, but didn't see much action. This zoo is involved in a lot of fascinating work in conservation as well as helping injured wildlife. Check out their website if you'd like to. We could have done more, but we went into the day pretty weary and did what we could. Again, it was a different experience without the wonder (and challenge) of children in our charge, but good nonetheless. The variety of creatures on this earth is amazing, and it's always good to be reminded of God's incredible creation.

Tasmanian Devils. We didn't see them in
Tasmania, but had to wait to NSW!
It's time like this that I wish for a camera
with a zoom lens.

African lion

Days 54 & 55: Melbourne to Wagga Wagga to Dubbo

Our journey wasn't over, Melbourne is still 1,600 kilometres from our home in Ipswich. So this week was a week of driving, but we did have some interesting stops along the way.

Our first stop this Sunday was for church. We'd planned to go to a church not far from the caravan park, but we were ready to go too early for that. A strange problem! It seemed silly to be sitting around twiddling our thumbs when we could be driving, so we Googled intensely looking for a church service further along our route that we would get to if we left very soon. We happened upon Hume Presbyterian Church in Craigeburn, a newish suburb on the very northern edge of Melbourne. It was a modern, welcoming church (we got welcome bags with chocolate!) and we enjoyed our time there, but had our eyes on the road, so didn't stay for the shared lunch afterwards.

I've got hardly any photos from this day, just a road shot. We stopped for lunch at a lovely park just off the highway in Broadford, but the van was parked on such an angle that we used non-slip matting on the dining table.

We parked for the night at Wagga Wagga at a free camp by the might Murrumbidgee River. The free camp had only a small toilet block, and one of those wasn't flushing well. I'm guessing that most people were using their own onboard toilets, because there were many, many caravans and motorhomes there, but not very much traffic to and from the loos. It would have been a pretty spot, but somehow all the vans wrecked that a bit.

Parked near us was a family that appeared to be moving, but didn't have the money for accommodation. They slept in their two overly full cars, even though that was against the rules of this free free site. It sounds like they were headed somewhere (they were close enough that we could overhear their conversations), but didn't have sufficient funds to buy petrol to get any further along on their journey until later in the week. Cost of living is causing a national crisis, as the media tells us almost daily now. This nation has cruised along fairly comfortably (as a whole) for many years now, and that's meant people's expectations have increased. Because we duck in and out of the country we've noticed increases perhaps more than those who haven't left the country. In the 23 years we've been away it has continually gotten more expensive to live here (significantly more than Japan). Apparently prices have risen more sharply in the last couple of years and certain the rental situation is crazy. It's sad to see the results of this and it rightly makes us uncomfortable.

Murrumbidgee River, second longest river in Australia

The next morning we drove into Wagga Wagga and walked along the river for a short while. They've created a lovely park and community area (with wide path) along the river in the middle of town. We walked on Wagga Beach (river beach).

Wagga Beach

We stopped for lunch in a service station car park on the outskirts of a small town of West Wyalong, then proceeded north. We drove through a few towns that used to be significantly bigger than they are now, this is because gold had been found in the area in the mid 1800s. 

Wagga Beach

We stopped in Parkes Information Centre to use their loos and check about visiting The Dish. "The Dish" is a Radio Telescope north of Parkes. Its claim to fame is that it captured most of the images for the first walk on the moon. A fictionalised version of this story is told in the Australian classic movie "The Dish", hence the nickname of the telescope. (Watch it, if you haven't, it's good entertainment!)

The Dish. We did not expect to get this close to it!

Our goal for this day was to get to Dubbo because we'd booked tickets to spend the next day at the famous Dubbo Zoo. After a bit of a Google maps adventure (trying to find a grocery store...who knew that Dubbo was so large and had multiple large such stores?) we eventually got food and parked for the night at a caravan park. It was the first time we'd arrived after dark, but thankfully set-up wasn't hard, and indeed pretty routine by this time in our journey! We encountered another ammenities block with loud radio playing inside all day and night. This time it was just chatty stuff, not AFL, but still, it wouldn't have been my choice of station if I'd had a choice. Still, it was a nice spot to pull up. Lovely to be so close to the toilets again.

Mentally, though, this was a little bit of a tough week. I was getting tired of the constant moving and yearning to get home; going through the motions to get there, though, was a bit of a strain. We'd not had a "day off" for a couple of weeks by this time and were pretty weary, in body and soul. Thankfully we'd planned a couple of special things to do this week to help us keep up the momentum, and the zoo was one of those.

Day 53: day in Melbourne

On our whole day in Melbourne we walked a couple of kilometres to the train. We ended up walking nearly nine kilometres this day. We actually did a lot of walking during April, during the month we walked an average of 4.4 kilometres a day, a couple of kilometres more than we usually walk, so walking a couple of ks to the train wasn't a big deal.

We've only been to Melbourne a few times in our lives. One of those times was during our honeymoon, where we also visited the MCG and Australian Sports Museum. I like to joke that I nearly lost David there last time! There's a tonne of information and if you're interested in sport and history you can easily spend hours there.

We left the caravan park early, leaving plenty of time for things to go wrong, but nothing did, so we ended up getting to the stadium way too early for the tour we were booked on. So we took a walk through the local area. Wikipedia says this about the area: 

It is considered to be Australia's "premier sports precinct" and regularly hosts some of the biggest domestic and international sporting events, including the AFL Grand Final (Australian rules football), Australian Open (tennis), and the Boxing Day Test (cricket). The venues have also previously hosted the 1956 Summer Olympics and the 2006 Commonwealth Games.

Rowing on the Yarra

It's clearly also an entertainment location. Taylor Swift performed at the MCG three times in February, each were sell-outs (96,000 people). The day we were there we saw lines of people (mostly young women) who had obviously spent part or all of the night waiting in line to get into a concert at another venue in the precinct. A security staff member told us it was a concert by former member of One Direction, Niall Horan.

Victorians love their sport and this precinct
is well equipped to handle tens of thousands
of people. There are several large train
stations nearby, not to mention trams.

We walked as far as the Yarra River and discovered another sporting event underway. It was a university rowing regatta.

We've watched cricket matches at the MCG many times in our lives. It was great to see it again in person, though it was all set up for AFL matches (they had three on that weekend, one each night).

The commentators have an amazing view (obviously).

This is an amazing tapestry made to celebrate the
150th anniversary of the MCG in 2003. It's
seven metres long and two metres high. Absolutely
stunning in its detail.

This is the distinctive suit Cathy wore
when she won the 400 m gold 
in Sydney.

After a 45 min tour of the stadium we gave ourselves over to exploring the huge Australian Sports Museum. It was wonderful. I discovered exhibits about Cathy Freeman, an Australian athlete who won gold at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 in the 400 m. She's in the Australia Sport Hall of Fame. I've got a story about her that I don't think I've shared here—it's not exactly relevant to my everyday life. (This is my memory, I'm not sure how accurate it is.) She is practically the same age as me and in our last three years of high school we were attending schools in the same town. I was a little bit of an athlete at the time and represented our school in the 4x100 m. We ran in the same race for our schools, though I'm almost certain we weren't in the same leg. I wasn't the fastest at our school, so I think I was running second or third leg of the relay and she would have been their last runner. We had the Australian Junior Long Jump Champion in our team (my friend) who I'm pretty sure ran our last leg. I don't know which school won...it would be nice to think we did, but I suspect that Cathy outran everyone. She won gold and silver at the Commonwealth and Olympic Games in the next few years after all. Anyway, it's a fun story and I even got to tell it to one or two of the staff at the museum!

We decided to head home when we still had a little bit of energy to walk to the train and from the train to the caravan park. It was a fun day that we're glad we took the time do. Cricket, especially, is a shared interest of ours that we love to indulge in together. I think it's important to invest in these shared interests, especially as our years of investing daily in our boys are over ("daily" being the key word here, we're still part of their lives, just not so intensely).

The next day we really got going on our journey home. Over the next five days we drove about 1,600 km to get home, stopping along the way to take in a few sights. I'm going to condense those days into just three posts, so as not to prolong the end of this journey too much!

Day 52: Ferry to Geelong to Melbourne

We arrived in Geelong on the ferry before sunrise. Based on our experience a month earlier, we immediately drove up to the car park between the botanical gardens and the foreshore, where we could park for free for as long as we wished. We ate our second breakfast there (we had muesli bars before leaving our cabin at 6.30 am) and enjoyed savouring the sunrise over the ocean.

We had two goals for this day: go to the National Wool Museum in Geelong and drive to a caravan park in north Melbourne. It took us much of the day to get this done! 

Foreshore of Geelong. We walked
along this former pier.

The Wool Museum didn't open until 10, which is a long time to wait when you've been up since 5.45! We wandered through the botanical gardens and then along the foreshore, out on a jetty and finally arrived outside the museum at 9.45 where we ate some morning tea.

Scarlet-star, of the bromeliad family.
Native to north and south America

The museum was worth visiting. We learnt about the history of the area as well as more about the wool industry. Australia was a wealthy nation from pretty early on in its history, mostly due to wool, an industry that remained a major part of our economy for almost 200 years. Sheep arrived with the first fleet, but less than 10 years after the first white settlers landed on the continent sheep were imported with the goal of developing a wool industry. I had no idea that Australia had once had natural grasslands. I'd always assumed that trees covered the land until they were cut down by immigrants. In any case, the museum told us that the native grasslands were largely destroyed by sheep and there is little left now.

The main reason wool was a great industry for this new nation was because it didn't degrade with time—it took months to get produce to the "motherland". Of course they had to develop sheep that would cope with Australian conditions and succeeded in that endeavour very well.

Geelong is where my mother was born (her family moved to Queensland before she was school aged). Apparently for many years the city was known as the wool centre of the world. It was a fascinating couple of hours we spent in the museum. The blue-stone building itself is historical. It was built in 1872 as a wool store.

On the top floor we happened upon the Wildlife Photographer of the Year photo exhibition on loan from the Natural History Museum London. It was astounding. I had to stop reading after a while (all the photos had good stories with them) as I was running out of energy prior to lunch.

We walked back to the motorhome, ate lunch, and headed to Melbourne, stopping along the way for some groceries.

Greenhouse at Geelong botanical gardens

A False African Violet. Native to
Tanzania

The biggest stress of the day came late. We were booked to do a tour of the MCG (Melbourne Cricket Ground, an internationally famous stadium) the next day, but had to figure out how to get there and it wasn't easy. Public transport is hard for visitors, I wonder why cities don't work harder to make it more accessible. After visiting several Australian cities this year, my favourite is Sydney, where you are allowed to use your credit card as a "transit card" and don't have to pay extra for a card you're only going to use for a short time. The complexities didn't just include where we could get on and off, we had to figure out where we could by a local transit card on a Saturday morning and on our way to the train stations and buses replacing trains on the weekend.

We were thankful for another place to lay our heads (though it was the most expensive place that we slept in the motorhome in our whole journey). I was a little bit discombobulated by the loud local radio playing in the ammenities block, though. We'd definitely landed in AFL (Aussie Rules football) territory. The radio broadcast that night from a live game at the MCG was just a taste of what was to come the next day.

You find weird plants in botanical gardens. This
one is an Arizona cypress?

Museum

This internal blue-stone wall in
the museum has been restored.

An exhibit of various sheep breeds. These were real
sheep with names that had been expertly taxodermied.

Reflecting on our month in Tasmania

This was our Tasmanian journey. We would have
liked to make it to more of the west and north-east
coast, but there were almost no sealed roads in
the areas on those coasts you see we didn't go. We
also would have preferred not to have to drive
on the same roads, but it was impossible to avoid, 
particularly in the middle (we drove the road from
Queenstown to Derwent Bridge twice) and in the
south-east (we drove through Hobart a few too 
many times).

Our long road trip was not yet over, but I'm pausing a moment to write about our month in Tasmania.

It was a fun destination. Tasmania is one of those places on a wishlist of most Australians (and many have been there). Though most people don't spend a month there driving around in their own vehicle, we encountered plenty who were there for a while in their caravans or motorhomes (it's expensive to get there, the ferry is the only way if you're driving your own vehicle). We were there long enough to see some of the lesser-known places, and that was fun. Like most road trips, though, there was always more we could have seen!

Tasmania is fun because there's so much to see in so little space. We met friends in Hobart who originally come from Queensland, but are confirmed Taswegians now (at least in their minds). They said, it's not that there is not lots of great things to see in the rest of Australia, but they are so far apart. I agree. You can drive a long way (like many, many hours, or even days) to see just one thing in other parts of Australia, whereas you can drive just an hour in Tassie and see many things. I think we kinda got used to it, but early on it felt like around every bend there was something new and amazing you could see.

Tasmania lived up to its reputation of being cold. And considering how far south it is, that isn't surprising—it's at a similar latitude to Hokkaido, which gets many metres of snow each winter. It's also a similar latitude to Boston and the southern tip of South America. It's significantly colder than Queensland, but not as cold as Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan. In fact, looking at the weather graph, temperatures doesn't fluctuate anything like Tokyo or Canberra do. Tokyo gets much, much hotter and a bit colder than Hobart. Hobart is just generally cool most of the year. We were there in the April, the so-called second month of Autumn, but we were already often wearing more layers than we do in winter in Ipswich during the day (nights were similar to winter in Ipswich). Though it's worth noting that the van had no heating in the "house" part.

Roads are generally narrow and windy with very suspect edges. Most open road speed signs were more of a suggestion that we laughed at than anything we could realistically do in the motorhome (maybe it would have been possible on a motorbike?). 

Parts of the island look very foreign, especially the more remote ones, but other areas looked very Australian. I've added some photos from various parts of the state at the bottom of this post to compare.

We were surprised at how remote some areas were, despite it being a small island.  There are many places it's impossible to get to on a sealed road. Several of our campsite required us to drive on a dirt road. And, as I mentioned early on in my journey, there are places where it's hard to find medical care. But we were surprised that many small towns had decent grocery stores (many of them are regional centres). 

In writing this I had fun looking at size comparisons. Tasmania is smaller than Hokkaido, around the same size as Sri Lanka, twice as big as Taiwan, half the size of England, and slightly smaller than Scotland. It's about the same size as the US state of West Virginia. 

There is much to see for lovers of history, science (ecology, biology, botany, geology), adventure, and active holidays—mountain biking and hiking (remote and much more tame). There is less for those looking for shopping or high density areas. There are plenty of vineyards and open cellar doors. We saw lots of beaches, but not many were surfing beaches. And certainly, if you're a lover of hot weather, you probably would find this island a challenge, except in the middle of summer.

It's noteworthy that almost a quarter of the state is World Heritage listed, you can see it's the darker part of this map. Much of this area you can't drive into.

Our time in Tasmania was also driven by budget considerations. We carefully selected what we paid to do (river cruise, a handful of museums, etc.) and spent most of our time doing free things like walking. We used a combination of free, low-cost campsites and caravan parks to keep our costs low, the combination of these was driven by a limited amount of water we could carry onboard and the shower in the motorhome, which isn't great. We also ate the vast majority of our meals in the motorhome. Usually our morning routine included me making a coffee-to-go to save on the cost of buying one in the afternoon. Probably our biggest expense was getting there and the petrol to get around. (Borrowing a motorhome rent-free was a huge saving, and one for which we are very grateful to my parents for.)

Below is a selection of about 20 photos (the slide show you may or may not want to see). They are mostly showcasing the Tasmanian countryside that we saw.

An unusually straight road! I was often
driving the really curly ones, so didn't
get many photos of them.

The dilemma that was evident time and time
again as we read the history of this state.

Did not expect to see sand dunes!

Something we saw many times was clear
water like this.

A dairy farm. There's plenty of agriculture in Tasmania.
Dairy, vineyards, sheep, and beef were the chief ones we saw.
So many sheep!

We camped on this very bleak beach on a misty, cold day. It was 
probably the eeriest place we visited.

Day 51: Greens Beach to Devonport to the ferry

More beautiful Tasmanian water: Bass Straight

On our last day in Tasmania we drove east as far as we could at Greens Beach (not far), parked, and walked on the Beach. Then we drove to the end of the road in the nearby Narawntapu National Park, out to the west of where we’d slept. From there we walked a short way out to a lookout on the coast, overlooking Badger Beach. Another gorgeous beach, but we didn’t feel the need to walk on it too!

Badger Beach

We then took off for our final destination in Tasmania, the place it had all begun: Devonport. We had a lunch date there with a mutual friend from our uni days, someone we hadn’t seen since the mid 90s. She was on her lunch break, so it was a fast and furious, yet good catch up.

Final beach walk in Tassie: Greens Beach

Then we still had hours to kill because the ferry was scheduled to depart around sunset. We filled up with petrol, encountering the only petrol station on our entire journey with a roof too low for our 3.25 m high home-on-wheels. We were problem solving this very thing when one of the staff (or owner?) ran out and told us about the roof (several vehicles had run into it in recent times).

Then we headed to a familiar-type destination: a seaside park with free parking. We were not the only ones doing this: several other motorhomes came and went during our hours there. We went for a short walk out onto a jetty, admiring a final seaside view, before we headed to the ferry.

Looking across the mouth of the Tamar River to
Low Point where we stayed earlier in our journey.

While we waited in a car park-shaped line to board the ferry we watched the sun go down and listened to the audio book we had only a few “pages” left to finish. It was a nice ending to our time in Tassie.

Our final Tasmanian sunset: over Devonport

Driving onto ferries is interesting in a tall vehicle. We, along with others our height, squeezed between the lower deck, the side of the ship, and a movable deck on our right. It was tight. The vehicle ahead of us nearly stripped the top right side of his van by veering too far away from the side of the ship and into the deck that was lower than the top of his vehicle (and ours). When you’re used to driving a car you don’t easily think about where the top of your vehicle is located in space.

Mersey River, Devonport

Then we packed our bags quickly in the dim lighting of the bowels of the ferry and headed upstairs to our cabin for the night. We enjoyed a similar meal to the one on the way over: a pie and salad followed by ice cream, all bought from a little shop that reminded us of Japanese convenience stores.

If you enlarge you can see our motorhome and
in the distance is the ferry we would later board.

We hadn’t had a quiet day for over 10 days by this point, so were very tired. In the latter part of our journey it was common for us to go to bed around 8.30, lights out by around 9.30. Part of that was fatigue, but also cold in our unheated van. We sat out in the quiet reading room for a while until the ferry felt cool. I wonder if someone turned the air con down to encourage people to retreat to their cabins for the overnight journey? We slept well, if a bit short, due to being awoken early for disembarking the next morning.

Reading room on ferry