We spent the day in Alice Springs until having to leave for Cairns around 5:00 today. Alice Springs is a surprisingly nice little city of about 25,000 people out in the middle of the desert. Our first stop was "ANZAC Hill" which is basically a pile of rocks that sticks up a couple hundred feet just oustide the downtown area. On top of the hill is a memorial to Australian servicemen who lost their lives in conflicts since WWI. The memorial was very tastefully done:
ANZAC Hill also provided a nice vantage point overlooking the city:
The terrain continues to remind me of the Southwestern US. From the Hill, we went on over to the Alice Springs Desert Park, which really surprised me with the amount of information, displays, exhibits, and live animals it had and the quality of the displays. This place was really interesting. I didn't know that there was this much diversity in the local animal and plant life.
Here was one of the larger animals in the park:
If you look closely, you can see that it's an Emu.
And here are three of the smallest critters on display:
These are Thorny Devil lizards and they're surrounded by small ants, their preferred food. Talk about a walking buffet!
Pat's Paragraph.... The above lizards are nocturnal and have a stuttering step, swaying back and forth. They look scary with different colors and their horns. The park had a fabulous film about the animals found in the desert and their specializations and adaptions so they would live and thrive there. And that is the biggest part of the problem. They are so specialized, that they eat only a certain food. And when that food disappears, so does that animal. The sad part is the extinction rate. Australia has the highest rate of extinctions in the past 200 years than anywhere else. The only knowledge of some of these are the stories and rock art the Aborigines have made or been told. There is a small animal that looks like a tiny kangaroo that is holding on barely. There were only 2 colonies left on the mainland and were protected. But no one told the 1 fox (brought in to kill off the rabbits that the colonists brought in to feed the workers) that killed off every one of one of the colonies. The 2nd colony is now fenced and the area patrolled (in a park) trying desperately to help it survive. The rabbits (some escaped their pens and you know rabbits) have caused wide spread damage to the fragile environment causing areas to be totally bare because it takes so long to regenerate or another plant takes over. The animals can't adapt that quickly to the change and they are lost. There are predators in Australia but most of the animals that have gone extinct had no protection from the foxes, dogs and cats. Some of the cats and dogs are now feral. All the parks and preserves have signs that prohibit pets of any kind. Even the ranchers have changed the environment by bringing in different grasses and feed that have taken over in areas. The cattle and sheep have hooves that cut and kill the native plants that these indigenous animals depend on. The desert environment is very, very fragile and the ones that florished adapted to that.
The Park had a number of screened enclosures with birds of all descriptions in them. Here you can see two Australian Bustards:
All in all, the Park was very interesting.
As we were headed to the airport to depart, we stopped by the Road Transport Hall of Fame, which had a collection of old trucks going back to the 1920's that had been used to open up the Outback. It was pretty interesting also:
I'm not sure who the chap on the right is, but...
One thing we've seen a lot of here in the Outback is this:
It's a snorkel mounted on a truck. I'll bet half the trucks and a good percentage of the SUV's we've seen since we got to Ayers Rock had one...gotta wonder why you'd drive into water that deep, don't you?
As you can see, we finally got somewhere with a strong enough wifi signal that I can upload pictures. I'll go back over the past several days and insert the pictures I would have originally placed on the blog site...
Tomorrow, we're in Cairns for the day.
