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Published: February 12th 2014
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With family living a little north of Newcastle, this part of the journey is becoming common, but certainly not boring.
There is an ongoing major upgrade of the Pacific Highway between Brisbane and Sydney, or more particularly a little north of Newcastle to Brisbane. Even though it is just a few weeks since we were in Newcastle, new sections of the 4 lane highway have opened, and others in various states of construction.
Those who followed our trip last year around Australia will recall that we were stranded for about 10 days due to floods on the Pacific Highway. One of the major problems was the river at Kempsey which had a huge flood - just about 3 weeks before a new highway was due to open. This year the road is open and a huge improvement and built higher than the flood levels of record floods. This year there is a dreadful drought in NSW - more on that later. So no delays this time as we started our journey.
We were keen to get to see our middle grandson play Rep Cricket (junior grade) and their game was against the top team in NSW grade rep
cricket. While they lost by 7 runs, we enjoyed the day at the park, and their team gained a lot of confidence knowing that they are competitive against the top team.
From Newcastle we headed west to Dubbo. The journey takes us through the Hunter Valley - famous for coal and wine. As it happens, we bought neither. What we saw that in many areas farms are badly affected by the drought. Seems many farmers were prepared with feed, but the waterholes and dams were very low to crunchy dry. Pray for rain!
Driving through one of the small towns we passed by the local cemetery on the edge of town. We were surprised to find that there is an Anglican section, Catholic, Seventh Day Adventist, Presbyterian, Methodist etc etc. Not sure if they thought Heavan would be similar, or they were preventing religious disputes in the afterlife. Seems that there was no section for Athiest or any other other of many non-Christian world religions.
Dubbo is a strong regional town of around 33,000 population with plenty of touristy things to do. We have had the Taronga Western Plains Zoo on our bucket list for many years,
and today we made it happen.
This zoo is unlike city display zoos - it is part of an international chain of breeding zoos for at risk animals such as the Sumatran Tiger. Also, the zoo is set up like a safari park and done in a way that visibility of the animals is easy and without wire fences getting in the way.
The zoo is so natural that we just missed by 10 minutes seeing a baby Eland being born out in the paddock. We joined a few others and watched and soon bubs was up on the feet and after a lot of licking, a little nudging, some very shaky steps and a visit by a couple of aunts, baby started suckling. So we missed the elephant talk, but were the winners with photos!!!
Since the day was 40c, we were glad we took the option of driving from display centre to display centre. Some hire bikes, other some nifty safari buggies, but we do what is cheap! Self drive. Being a week day, there was plenty of parking, so no problems. Also, as there were small numbers at the zoo today, we had excellent
Found them!
About 30 minutes after birth photo access to the animals without too many shocking pink I-Pads beihg waved in our faces.
More good news. A day ticket is also valid for the next day, so we will be able to see a couple of sections that we missed today.
We both agreed that this zoo is just such good value, everyone should go see. You will hear a lot about the devastation of habitat which has put these creatures at risk, and a few good reasons not to buy palm oil or products based on palm oil, so go and hear this part of the story and enjoy the great access to these beautiful creatures.
If you have deep pockets, you can also feed the big cats and be a cat keeper for 20 minutes. Thought about that but that little Scotsman sitting on my shoulder made his presence heard again. Half a tank of diesel he said! Oh well, maybe next time!
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Stevo
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Zoooo
Loved the photos. Some really excellent shots. Well done.