Ginger Without Borders

As I discussed in the last post, when Dawn and I started planning our Down Under adventure, the Australia Zoo was at the top of the list of things we wanted to do since the Zoo was such an important part of Lena’s teen years. So although we were sad to be leaving, we navigated through downtown Brisbane successfully only to run into surprisingly heavy traffic for a Sunday morning as we drove north to the Australia Zoo (another tip of the hat to the Queen’s Birthday Holiday).

Once inside the Zoo, we had to wind our way through the throngs of Queen’s Birthday Holiday families to the Crocoseum.  To those who haven’t seen Steve Irwin’s TV show, the Crocoseum is a concrete lagoon surrounded on four sides by risers not unlike a minor league baseball stadium, except it is a perfect square. It is where the Zoo’s crocodile information/demonstration show is presented every day at noon.  The south side of the Crocoseum is the operations area of the Zoo.  The second floor of this section is a covered open air food court with views of the permanent crocodile enclosures.  The bottom floor has two stores selling Zoo souvenirs and the desk where they sell animal encounters.

Prior to leaving the US, Lena had booked a number of animal encounters for her Mom (and used her name, so the Zoo folks referred to Dawn as Lena). An animal encounter is the Zoo’s educational fundraiser where the park’s patrons get personal time with selected animals and their keepers.  The money raised is used for conservation efforts. In return, the patron gets an in-depth lesson about the subject animal from the keeper and a personal visit with the animal.  Dawn’s first adventure was a walk with a wombat. 

Dawn really, really wanted an experience with her favorite animal, the otter, but all of those had been sold out for weeks (the Queen’s Birthday Holiday at work against us again).  However, there was one slot that had come open. It was for the cheetah experience.  And we jumped on that “like a rat up a drainpipe” (Aussie saying). Lena had done the cheetah experience, so Mom was going to get the opportunity to follow in her footsteps.

While Dawn was walking the wombat, I attended a couple of the keeper talks.  The Australian Zoo has a limited number of animals, but they make a lot of effort to give their audience relevant information about the ones they display.  My favorite experience was getting to touch the scales of the various native lizards that keepers carried through the Zoo, including the blue tongued skink, one of the world’s largest skinks. The keeper was not aware of the five-lined skinks of North Carolina.  

Dawn and I meet long enough for her to say that the wombat walk was fun, but she needed to leave for her rendezvous with the cheetah. When we met again, her smile went from ear to ear.  “I got to pet a cheetah for 30 minutes” she kept saying.  And she got a picture:

The binturong experience was that afternoon.  And the next morning (the Queen’s Birthday Holiday), we rushed to the Zoo only to have the red panda decide it was too hot to come down from his pearch high in his tree.  Her money was refunded and she had to run for the leaping lemur experience.  I stumbled upon the 18 week old tiger cub while he took his daily stroll through the Zoo.  Apparently, I made him nervous when I went to my knee for a photo, and was asked by his keepers to stand while shooting my pictures.

While waiting for her final adventure with the echidna (look it up, it is the strangest animal in a land full of really strange animals), Dawn joined me at the mature tiger enclosure for the daily tiger training exercise.  See the crowds in the reflection in the glass walls as the keeper put this Sumatran tiger through his exercises.  The keepers proudly announced that the Zoo was the sponsor of millions of dollars of tiger protection research in Sumatra where the tiger is critically endangered.

Since Lena was a volunteer there, the Australia Zoo has held a special place in our family. The two days Dawn and I spent at the Zoo only reinforced our affection for the incredible work the Irwin family does to try to make this world a livable space for our fellow creatures, even crocodiles.

PS. Lena, your Mom spent a lot of your inheritance on animal encounters, but you wanted her to do that. She now has more animal experience photo magnets than you. She is also still on cloud nine, and has no desire to kill me.