UHOs

Our 10-day bus tour from Alice Springs up to Darwin included all the sites and we’ll tell you about them in another entry. As we have seen in other parts of Australia, the extent of roadkill is extraordinary. Here in the outback roadkill is less prominent simply because you have far fewer vehicles on the road and even fewer driving at nighttime. Indeed, in Tasmania we would frequently see signs indicating that whereas the daytime speed limit was 100km/hr, the nighttime was 65km/hr. You don’t want to meet a kangaroo head on at 100k/hr! On the other hand, if you are a Road Train in the outback, who cares.

On our trip out from Alice Springs to “the rock,” as the locals call it — meaning Uluru or Ayers Rock — our guide and driver Jessie suddenly braked and we saw this blur of an animal cross the road. And that is your UHO, and only here in Australia — an Unidentified Hopping Object. We say this because we can no longer assume that the UHO is a kangaroo. Well, was it a Red Forest kangaroo or a Grey kangaroo? Or was is this type of wallaby or that kind? Or was it perhaps a Euro, which also hops and is somewhere in size between a kangaroo and a wallaby. We have just decided that everything hops here in Australia (except perhaps the cows — they simply appear in large herds on the road, causing everyone to slow down!)

So, indeed, unless you can get a good long look at your HO, it may indeed be a UHO.

So we have greatly enjoyed getting to see many of the Australian mammals, including the monotremes, which may be egg-laying or not. Things are really messed up down here, if you wish everything to be neatly classified. We really appreciated our time with our Friends Peter and Julie Webb in Adelaide. Peter is a composer and conductor and we joined in a rehearsal of his local choir that he has been leading for the past 28 years. Peter and Julie were very patient with us as a pestered them about wanting to see a koala. After several nice walks but without any sightings, they got word from a friend that we should go walk along a certain creek in Adelaide. It was our last chance. And there we spotted our first and perhaps last koala in the wild. They look cuddly but have long claws to climb the trunks of the eucalyptus tree. So we probably did not want to be hugged by one.

Like New Zealand there have been some pretty disastrous decisions made about importing certain animals. Here in the outback it must have seemed a no brainer back in the 1920s?? to import camels, particularly since the horses and mules were having a hard time with the heat and aridity. The problem is that many of these camels are now feral and, when it does rain, they can drink a water hole dry — one camel can drink up to 100 litres at one time — and so not leave any water for the endemics. Every few years the government allows a cull of camels which means a mass shooting of the creatures from helicopters. A pity since their long eyelashes make them very endearing!