Okay, so now we’re finally in the tropics, and we could feel
the humidity immediately when we got out of the bus. There’s not a whole lot
going on in Rocky, so we decided to spend just one day and do everything. This
included the zoo, a rodeo and a botanical garden.
The gardens and the zoo were connected, so we hit them
together. We crawled around the gardens at a sloth’s pace in the soupy humidity
and watched the huge flocks of pelicans, cormorants and egrets around the small
lake. Then we went to the zoo. At first glance, it looked like a sad little
underfunded zoo, in need of a little love. But we went to each of the feedings
and discussions offered and found the staff to be quite engaged and committed
to the animals, most of which were rescues. We were delighted at the level of
education we received. They did a great job of stressing what we could do to
help the plight of the animal, like recycling cell phones so that a material
that is mined in Chimp habitat can be reused! I hope you’re all listening. J
Our favorite, though, were the Koalas. We had read somewhere
that Koalas aren’t, well, booksmart. So true. They have a completely vacant
look in their eyes. They only eat something like 10% of the 800 Eucalypt
species, which are poisonous to eat. Since they spend so much energy digesting
this difficult food source, evolutionary change somehow decided that the best
thing to do would be to require fewer calories to function. Consequently, the
Koala has a walnut size brain bouncing around in a mostly fluid-filled skull!
Dumb as they may be, they are about the cutest animal I’ve ever seen, and the
vacant look and hesitant, slow movements only amplified the effect.
That night, we went to the Great Western Hotel (yes, on the
Eastern coast) for the two for one dinner special and to watch rodeo practice.
We thought it would be good fun to be able to say we’ve been to a rodeo in the
Beef Capital of Australia…and now we can. The funniest part was that if you
removed a couple of advertisements around the corral that actually said
“Australia,” you would have no idea you weren’t somewhere in western United
States. Anyway, not our thing really, but it was entertaining to watch how fast
the bull won when the younger group was practicing
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