Roos!

Beth hiking in the bush

After camping in the rain for days, we decided to head inland and visit the Outback.  We figured it must be drier there, and the spot we had in mind wasn’t too far away.  Driving in the Outback was quite the experience!   The only paved part of the road was one lane right down the middle; when we met another car on the road, both of us would move over and ride partly on the gravel shoulder and partly on the paved middle.  UNLESS…it was a road train.  These are large trucks with up to three trailers attached to them and they pretty much rule the road.  They drive down the middle of the road, on the paved area, and don’t slow down at all for oncoming traffic.  We did the best we could to get as far onto the shoulder as possible, surviving the dust and debris that rained down on us after it passed.  Wow!  Luckily the roads are pretty straight and open so you can see them coming up the road quite a way ahead.

Road train in the Outback

Our destination in the Outback was Undara National Park, where they do tours of old lava tubes.  We did not do any of the tours, but we did take advantage of the campground, the pool, and the guided nighttime walks.  The bathrooms themselves were a study in the various insects of the area (Yeesh! And not in a good way!).  I showered with a very active frog one morning, keeping my eye on him the entire time, just in case.  During our first evening in the park I was waiting for Daron outside the bathrooms and three kangaroos went jumping right by me!  We followed them into the hotel compound and watched them for a while, happy that we were finally able to see kangaroos.  Later that afternoon we took a short hike and saw kangaroos everywhere!  Wallabies too!  There were so many of them it was almost ridiculous.  As I was watching them in the wild, all sorts of questions popped into my head:  do kangaroos have any predators, how long do they live, etc…  It inspired me to find out a little more about them, and this is what I found out:

The kangaroo has hardly any predators here in Australia, besides the dingo and the odd vehicle that may hit them in the mornings/evenings when they’re active.  They only live 4-6 years, which helps explain why there are not more of them. The government does “harvest” them, in order to keep their numbers down – their numbers have increased since the introduction of European farming methods (lots more grass to eat!).  There are no kangaroo farms;  licensed hunters are allowed to kill a certain amount in the wild, depending on the population.  We haven’t tried it, but kangaroo meat is supposed to be quite tasty and low in saturated fat compared to other meats.  Interestingly, kangaroos are great swimmers. Kangaroos have no breeding cycle and are perpetually pregnant (and you thought nine months was a long time to be pregnant!).  The joey (baby kangaroo) is born after 31-36 days; it’s about the size of a lima bean, with only its forearms slightly developed, which it uses to crawl up its mother’s belly into the pouch where it attaches itself to a teat and stays for about nine months.  The female has the ability to freeze its pregnancy if food and water are scarce.  It can also simultaneously produce different milk for each teat, one fit for the tiny lima-bean joey, and one for the older joey that is out of the pouch and sometimes still needs its mother’s milk.  Quite the adaptation! 

Daron and kangaroos!

No matter how many kangaroos we see, they are always fun to watch.  It seems like so much effort for them to hop around like they do, but what I learned is that energy is stored in their tendons, rather than their muscles, so it doesn’t take muscular energy for them to hop.  The hopping action expels air from the lungs, making it an efficient way to travel in such a harsh environment.   The hopping requires little energy, and increased speed requires little extra effort.  Speed is not necessary for escape since they have virtually no predators; instead it’s used to cover large distances in search for food and water.   There you go - everything you never wanted to know about kangaroos!  As we see more and more of them all over, I find them very fascinating.  They look like a cross between a deer and rabbit with a weird pear-shaped body.  When the Europeans first saw them with their joeys peeking out from their mother’s pouches, they thought they were some strange two-headed being!

Kangaroo family

Anyhoo, we enjoyed spying on the kangaroos in the Outback.  More discoveries awaited us on the night walk at the park.   It was cicada season, a cicada being a large locust-like bug that hatches for about three weeks each year about this time, where the males are very noisy while they are trying to attract the females.   It sounded like we were under very noisy power lines the entire time we were there.  For some reason the evening we took the walk I must have smelled like a very attractive female cicada because I had three (yes, three!) different cicadas fly into my head and hair and knock themselves out.  Of course I did the requisite screaming and dancing around that I do whenever any big bug flies into my hair!  Yeesh. 

We also came across an Orb Weaver spider, which was humongous as far as spiders go.  They are as big as a person’s hand.  Yuck!  Our guide, who is also not fond of spiders, told a story about pulling his shorts off his clothesline before a party, where he played for an hour or so with a piece of lint in his pocket while at the gathering, only to pull it out hours later and find one of those big orb weavers in his hand!  Yikes!  I have goosebumps even now thinking about it! 

Our other wildlife sighting that night was a cane toad (more yuck!).  They were introduced to Australia in the 1930s, in hopes that they would eat the beetles that were ravaging the sugar cane fields.  The toads didn’t like the beetles and have changed the ecology of the area in which they were released.  They are poisonous, but only if you eat or lick them (no chance of that!).  They will make a crocodile very sick.  The Aussies have their own humorous way of dealing with them, developing sports such as cane toad golf and cane toad cricket! 

Not quite the lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) that we could see in other parts of the world.  We enjoyed our short time in the Outback, even though the rain caught up with us, even out there in the “dry” areas.  Everywhere we went for a week straight it rained.  We’d check in at a campground and the host would say, “we haven’t had rain all year” and then as soon as we put up our tent it would start to pour!  People we’d meet at the campgrounds would ask which direction we were headed just so they could make sure to go the opposite way!  We kept our sense of humor about it all; it became an ongoing joke with us!    

Our new and improved rental car

After the Outback we headed back to Cairns so we could book a snorkel trip out to the Great Barrier Reef.  The day before our trip we were checking out a local campground when our beater car died.  Oh no!  It wasn’t completely unexpected; we didn’t have a lot of faith in that car from day one, but if it had to die it picked a good time and place.  The caretaker at the campground was SO helpful – we are very grateful for all she did for us that day!  Eventually the rental company replaced the car with a nice newer rental car, which we enjoyed driving around town while we had it!  We are so fortunate that the car didn’t break down while we were out in the Outback!