From Orange to Dubbo
It's only a fairly short drive from Orange to Dubbo, and the road features a lot of "animals on wheels". It's a similar to the tin horse highway around Kulin (another blog earlier on). Here is only one example but there were lots of beautiful and creative figures along the road.
Dubbo and the Taronga Western Plains Zoo
Our next stop was Dubbo, where we stayed for free at the Red Earth Winery ;-) It's basically at the far end of the Taronga Western Plains Zoo outside of town and it was lovely and quiet (apart from some idiots playing race cars in the middle of the night). The zoo covers an area of 3 sqkm and on a 6km oneway drive you can take a tour to visit all the animals, either self-driving, walking, using hire pushbikes or electro-buggies. There are talks and feeding times when the animal carers talk about the local animals, the breeding as well as the threads and dangers in the wild. I was very astonished to hear that some of the rhino species now are endangered with less than 5000 animals in the wild and a total of 15,000 animals being killed just in 2015. The horns are worth US$ 65,000 per kilo on the blackmarket and that's the reason. The 7 month old black rhino baby in the zoo has a tiny little horn which already weighs around 1 kg. His mothers horn weighs about 5-6 kg... a fortune for a lot of people and therefore worth the risk. And sadly some cultures still believe in the magic powers of rhino horn which -chemically speaking- nothing else than our fingernails or hairs.
Apart from those sad news the talks were very informative and gave us the chance to see a lot of the animals close up. The giraffes were amazing. Beautiful pattern, so tall and their tongue is about 30 cm long and can wrap around a carrot :-) We all loved the meerkats (Erdmaennchen), being so playful and always having one on the watch for danger up on the highest point in their territory. We also saw lions, tigers, hippos, big turtles, zebras, gibbons, elephants and much more. Sarah enjoyed the day but became very tired and on that hot day, after 4 hours we had to leave and have some quiet time. And we still had to clean our shoes: the 6th of December is 'Nikolaus' day, a german tradition for the kids where you have to put your clean and shiny shoes outside for Nikolaus to fill them with nuts, oranges and chocolate - if you've been good...
Nikolaus placed Sarahs shoes back into the caravan just in case the animals would come and 'steal' the chocolate ;-)
The zoo seems to know how much there is to see and so the ticket allows entry on two consecutive days - which we happily used, coming back early next morning to see and enjoy more of the animals.
At lunchtime we finally managed to leave the zoo and Dubbo, heading towards the Warrumbungles Nationalpark.
Warrumbungles National Park
