Day 8 - An AI Assisted 10 Day Tour in New South Wales Australia
We’re staying in another NRMA Holiday Park in Dubbo. This is a great way to travel and keep costs reasonable. We have a 2 bedroom cabin with a kitchen, full bath, and a nice covered deck with BBQ, for just over $150 AUD per night. Nice and clean and the people running it are awesome.
Our reason for coming to Dubbo was to visit the Taronga Western Plains Zoo. The animals do not roam free but are in large enclosures so as you drive through the 5km park you can stop along the way and wander around. We ended up walking about 6km but it was well worth it. Like most zoo’s, they are all about conservation and in some cases breeding to help species come back from near extinction, or even complete extinction in the wild. If you’re ever in this part of the world, it’s well worth the time to come to Dubbo and spend a day. We took over 5 hours with a short lunch stop halfway through. It was hot, somewhere around 34C but we managed to find enough shade along the way. Needless to say, Cathy and I were wiped out by the end of it. Marilyn grew up on a farm in Australia and is used to the heat, so for her, this was just a normal day! I took around 250 pictures, and again, I’ve tried to pick out what i think give a a feel for the experience.
A few of my favourite Zoo pics!
One of the best examples of conservation we came across in our visit was the re-introduction of the Tahki, Mongolian horses, to the wild. They were declared extinct in the 1960’s but breeding programs in captivity, and a planned re-introduction program have brought them back from the brink. They’ve been successfully re-introduced to the wild in Mongolia, and while still endangered, the herds are growing.
Tomorrow is a trip to Tamworth. No particular reason, more just to break up our trip back to the coast. There are a couple of places ChatGPT has highly recommended we stop, so stop we will!
