Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve and the Canberra Space Centre

Several folks who have emailed me from Canada have given me weather updates, including detailed descriptions of how much snow has fallen recently. So let me assure you that here in OZ, summer is in full swing! Yesterday Jen and I took a drive into the countryside and enjoyed yet another day of 33C, brilliantly sunny weather. I am going through sunscreen like it's nobody's business!

Our main objective yesterday was Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve, which is a 45-minute drive outside of Canberra. We had originally planned to go much further, all the way into the Snowy Mountains to Thredbo and Mount Koszciusco, the highest point in Australia. However the weather forecast there was for 37C heat and there is no way that either of us were gonna be climbing a mountain in that! So we opted for Tidbinbilla instead. Our friend Robin had told us that this was a good place to maybe see a platypus!

The drive took us into the scrubby hills that are at the edge of the Snowy Mountains. The terrain was really strange. Some of the hills had been cleared for grazing and were only covered with grass. Other hills had straggly eucalypt forest on them, but it was patchy. Many hills were crowned with piles of huge boulders, each at least the size of a house! We decided that it looked like these were "unfinished" mountains. This entire area was devastated by huge bushfires that swept through the ACT (Australian Capital Territory) in 2003; apparently not a blade of grass was left untouched in the entire nature reserve that we visited!

After checking in at the Nature Reserve's visitor centre, we headed out to do some hiking. One of the trails started right from the first parking lot, so we decided to take it. What a strange trail! I don't know if it was just because the environment was still regenerating after the fire, but we didn't actually follow a footpath for most of the trail. Instead, we followed a series of marked posts with arrows to show us where to go. They led through these scrubby fields of grass with scattered trees. It seemed like a boring walk at first but - wait for it - we quickly realized that under each of the scattered trees, there was a group of kangaroos resting in the shade! At one point, we had to pass right by a group of roos to continue along the trail. We got close enough that if we had wanted to, we could have touched them! But these were definitely wild roos and while they tolerated us being so close, they weren't particularly happy about it. I remembered what we'd learned the day before, that kangaroos can't walk backwards, and made sure that whenever we approached a group of roos, that we left an escape route for the animals and didn't back them into a corner. Got some great photos though!

Then, we realized that not all the strange hillocks we were seeing in the distance in the fields were plants - a good number of them were emus, grazing away! Ha! We watched them from a distance for a bit, then decided to see how close we could get to one. The emus were just as unconcerned about us humans as the roos were. We spent about ten minutes stalking one bird that was somewhat separated from the group, and got within about ten feet before we stopped to take some pics. And then, after congratulating ourselves with our sneakiness, we were walking back towards the visitor centre when the whole group of emus came wandering across our path - again, close enough to touch! (There is no way I am gonna try touching a 6-foot-tall bird!)

The second trail we hiked was further into the reserve, up the crests of several cleared hills and through - of all things - a raspberry bramble (yet another introduced species), to a stand of grass trees. These plants (which are apparently related to lilies, as opposed to either grasses or trees) literally look like someone stuffed a tuft of long grass on the end of a tree trunk. They're pretty strange-looking, but have come to symbolize the toughness needed to survive in the Australian bush. They're also one of those ridiculously useful plants where every part of the plant is either edible or used to make clothing, baskets, etc. These plants are only found in Australia and are sadly in decline as they are very slow-growing.

The next trail took us to an ancient Aboriginal rock shelter, called the Hanging Rock. The path took us through regenerating eucalypt forest, which was all straggly with new growth. We climbed up a short, steep hill and rounded a corner to find one of the hugest boulders I have ever seen. Seriously, it was bigger than my parents' house! The boulder met the ground at an inwardly-sloping angle on one side, and it was here that the Aborigines used to gather. You could fit an entire Girl Guide unit under this side of the rock and have them all sleep out, with no problem!

We were beginning to get rather tired at this point, but still had two trails to go. On the Koala Trail we were - unsurprisingly - looking for koalas, but didn't see any. This whole section of the reserve was fenced off with some serious electrical fencing, apparently to keep out foxes. And then our last stop took us to a stream where we might find platypuses... but no luck. Most of the stream was also fenced off and inaccessible, as the reserve is rebuilding its wetlands and developing new nature trails in the area. Ah well, at least we tried! Maybe we're just not fated to see a platypus in the wild.

By this time we were pretty much fried, so we headed back to the visitors' centre for some much needed air conditioning and ice cream. Then it was time to head back to town, with one "quick" stop along the way. On our way out to Tidbinbilla, we had passed a small sign at the side of the road for the "Moon Rock Cafe" at the "Canberra Space Centre". Space centre? Who knew? So on our way back, we drove in to take a look. About 4kms down the road from the highway, and hidden behind hills so they weren't visible from the main highway, we came across a series of HUGE satellite radar dishes (apparently the largest radar complex in the Southern Hemisphere)! Holy cow! Turns out we had stumbled upon the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex. Apparently this is one of three such stations, set around the Earth and roughly equidistant from each other, that NASA uses to help track space missions. The placement of these three stations means that one of them is always able to monitor a spacecraft as the earth rotates below. COOL.

They had some pretty interesting displays. There was a whole section on the missions to the moon, including a moon rock and EKG readings from the astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission. (These EKG's were transmitted back to the US via the radar dishes we could see out the window.) They also had a display on the Mars rover missions, including a life-size model of one of the rovers. I hadn't thought they were so big - I had always imagined something about half the size of what I saw. (Random trivia - the cameras on the Mars rovers are set at the average eye-height for a human being... so the images we see from Mars are exactly how WE would see things if we were there in person.) Apparently we had arrived at the space centre at the same time as a high school field trip group, and they were being given a talk about Mars exploration by one of the centre's staff. He was an excellent speaker and Jen and I hung around until the end of his talk. The biggest thing I took away from his speech was that the astronauts who will be chosen to be the first people to walk on Mars will come from the generation of students who are currently in grades K-12. Something to think about, for sure!

So that was a completely random side trip, but well worth the time! We returned to Nikki's house tired and footsore, but very happy with our random day. Today is our last day to explore Canberra and there's still a lot to see, so we'd better get cracking!