Dubbo

After a very busy interlude at home over the Easter school holidays, we are off again. We started this six month leg of our travels with a few days in familiar territory. We had intended to start with a visit to friends in Orange, but that wasn't to be this time, so we headed straight to Dubbo and the wonderful Western Plains zoo.

We visited the historic Dubbo gaol first, as we were told there were 'characters in costume' on the weekend. Ben really enjoyed the characters at Sovereign Hill, so we made a point of going on the weekend. Sadly there were only two staff on that day, so they weren't able to run the character plays.  We did get a costumed tour guide who was quite entertaining.

The zoo was the real highlight of our visit to Dubbo (and the Rose Garden Thai restaurant near our caravan park, which we always enjoy :-) ).  We spent two days exploring the zoo and managed to fit in all the keeper talks, which are always very interesting. We all loved the baby elephant, and I was very taken with the wild dogs.

I think the galapagos tortoises were our highlight, with the remarkably tiny 3 year old and 6 year old babies, and slow, huge adults with their amazing finch-response.