Alice Springs Day 3: Desert Park & Kangaroos

Only a few hours after getting into bed, I was up again getting ready for my morning at the desert park. My host made me some avocado toast for breakfast which was very kind of her and then she drove me to the park (also kind). At the park, I walked around looking at the animals and attended many shows/talks including one about raptors and another about the tools aboriginals used to survive in the desert. It’s absolutely incredible that people could survive in this tough landscape with such limited tools!

After a great time at the park, I ordered a taxi to my next destination: School of the Air. Taking a taxi is the only real way to get around without your own car here. I ended up waiting for close to an hour for my taxi and it was so hot and I was getting hungry. Finally the taxi arrived and took me to the school. This school is special because it is for all the students that live in an extremely isolated place like for instance, a cattle farm in the middle of the outback. They wouldn’t be able to go into Alice Springs everyday for school so a virtual school was created. It started as a correspondence school, then moved to two-way radio and now Zoom. It’s so interesting how they were doing virtual learning decades before the pandemic. Apparently each year, a teacher must visit every student once. This can sometimes take very long drives. They raise money for the school by opening it up for tours and by having a gift shop. This is one of those things I had never thought about but now I really see how it would be necessary in such a place.

I talked to a woman that worked in the gift shop to learn more about the school and then I headed back to my Air BNB. I still hadn’t eaten so I went to the Woolworths (grocery store) to buy some food to eat on the way to my pickup location for the Kangaroo Sanctuary.

The Kangaroo Sanctuary is a run by a man named Chris who actually was on National Geographic BBC for a while in Kangaroo Dundee. There are a lot of Kangaroos that get killed by cars because they hop out to the side of the road to eat (often more vegetation because the ground is watered by water particles in exhaust from cars. Often the joeys in the mother’s pouch survive the crash due to the pouch’s protective muscles. Whenever Chris sees a dead Kangaroo, he checks the pouch and if there is a baby in it, he’ll take it out and raise it himself.

After nine months in the pouch, the kangaroos move into an enclosure with other kangaroos and they are weened off of human interaction so that by the time they are old enough to be released into the wild, they are no longer comfortable around humans (he doesn’t want the kangaroos hopping towards a hunter).

If one of the babies is injured and would not survive in the wild, he will release them into the sanctuary he’s created. The sanctuary is many acres of space enclosed by a fence protecting the kangaroos from their predators such as dingos. We walked around the sanctuary and I even got to pat a kangaroo.

The absolute highlight of the tour was that each of us got to hold a baby kangaroo for five minutes.

What an incredible experience and an incredible day. I’m gonna miss the red centre.