Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Darwin trip, 10-17 July, 2010
Part 1 - Getting there, Tumbling Waters and the Territory Wildlife Park

Crossing the tarmac in Melbourne. It's a little after midday, it's maybe twelve degrees and drizzling rain off and on, we're all wearing as little as we can get away with but that's still a few layers. I always think walking across the tarmac to a waiting plane is exciting. Some kind of anticipation and sense of adventure beginning that you don't get when you walk straight through a carpeted airlock into a long small bus.

We're in Darwin. James is installing the baby seat in the rental car, I'm loading luggage, and Sparrow is exploring. I stopped loading luggage in order to wrangle her away from parked cars. It's a little odd to see her in so little clothing - when we arrived it was about 5:30pm and a balmy 27 degrees or so. She didn't seem fussed by the heat at all, was just happy to start looking around after being cooped up for four and a half hours on the plane. And there were new and interesting leaves on the ground to find and chew, which her mother had to keep removing seeing as I didn't know what they were or how edible they were. I know very little about the plants of the tropics.

We were supposed to arrive within ten minutes of Mum (Sandra) and my brother / Sparrow's uncle Chris, who were flying in from Perth. But their plane was delayed by almost six hours. So we asked James' GPS for the nearest places to eat and went and had some quiet Red Rooster. While getting on to where we were staying would have been nice, by the time we'd got our baggage and car sorted out and confirmed that Mum and Chris hadn't even left Perth yet it was definitely dinner time for all three of us Melbourne-time-zone people. And Sparrow needed more time to run around before we attempted a forty minute car trip. She explored the outdoor eating area of RR a little but spent most of her time looking through the window at Daddy waiting near the counter. And then he came over to the door! With food! And she ate a surprising amount of it too.

This is the inside of our cabin at Tumbling Waters Park. We've unloaded and are just waiting for it to get late enough to go back to pick up Mum and Chris. The temperature was lovely. The cabins are air conditioned, but the night was relatively cool so we didn't need to leave it running. We were all enjoying the warmth after being locked in Melbourne winter for a couple of months.

Grandma (Sandra) has finally arrived. Sparrow was a little puzzled at first - we were back in the airport and there was no familiar context to place this lady whom she obviously knew. But Mum pulled out a toy - an old yarn doll that I must have played with a long time ago that has been retrieved from a trunk and cleaned up - and Sparrow is happily investigating. It has a big face, which is good. I'd been looking for a doll that was a size and made of stuff that was age-appropriate, and here one's arrived.

It's Grandma! And a new toy. They're playing on the deck outside Mum's cabin, next to ours. The surrounds are very lush and tropical, they've got over 25,000 palms around the site and several of the more water-loving trees so it seems very green. The savannah bushland immediately around us is a little less lush looking but full of amazing flowers at this point in the Dry.

Sparrow is running around on the lawn, or rather just generally exploring. Mum was walking with her and kept having other grandparent-types stopping to say hello and admire the gorgeous grandchild. Sparrow gave them each some attention, then found a leaf to eat. Again. Though sometimes she found rocks to chew on that she liked better.

Peekaboo around the cabin door. We're getting ready to go to the Territory Wildlife Park, just down the road from where we're staying.

Our first stop was Goose Lagoon. Mum and Chris went to the Sandbar show and saw archerfish and whiprays, which sounded very cool, but I didn't think Sparrow would have the tolerance for sitting and watching a show first off. So we went another stop along by shuttle train, and walked down through the savannah forest into the wetland forest surrounding Goose Lagoon. It was really quite magical. Such a distinctive boundary between the forest that gets flooded and the forest that doesn't, a complete change of undergrowth, debris and overgrowth within a liminal space of maybe a metre. James and Sparrow are sitting on the boardwalk just before the bird hide at the lagoon.

The lagoon was full of lilypads, lilies and rainbow bee-eaters swooping overhead.

Waiting at the Flight Deck for the Birds show. We met up with Mum and Chris there. It was a good long walk down a winding gravel path in the bush to get to the Flight Deck, and Sparrow happily went to sleep. She slept the whole way through the show, so we were able to watch it uninterrupted. That was nice - their two birds of prey were both ones I've seen several times at Healesville Sanctuary, but they had some quite different things to say about them. They also showed off a couple of types of parrot including a sulphur-crested cockatoo who was quite humourous to watch, and brought out a jabiru. A good all-purpose show with lots of nice information.

One of the gorgeous flowers we were walking past as we made our way along the pedestrian bushland trails around the park. These trees were bare of leaves but had these lovely red flowers growing straight out of the bark. If you look carefully you'll see a few visitors to this flower.

Another lovely plant find - an orchid growing on a cycad. The cycads here grow on thin trunks and were typically between 80-150cm high. They die back at this time of year so they look quite dead - but they aren't. This orchid appeared to be doing just fine regardless. This really brought home how different a woodland we were in - it seemed a bit like hot dry bush with just different plants than I was familiar with, but several of the trees had much larger leaves (sometimes huge!) and then there was an orchid just growing there at random. Awesome!

Lunchtime, after Sparrow significantly speeded up our visit to the Nocturnal House. After much determined walking around this grassy picnic area she is now being distracted by another toy that Grandma has pulled out of her bag. My mum thought about what might suit Sparrow's current stage and brought a few new things along that are proving excellent. Sparrow will happily discover new toys as often as possible, so she's having a great time. Rings have been popular for a while now but I don't have any at home, so this toy was a double delight. She spent a bit of time with the rings and with the tower they go on, and then she found a new game. Mum would proffer Sparrow's hat out like a bowl and Sparrow would put a ring in it. Then she'd take the hat from Mum and try and put it on her head with the ring still in. This was never very successful for some reason.

Sparrow pats a wallaby. There were agile wallabies roaming freely and searching for leftover lunches. This lady came up to us quite unafraid and investigated us all quite thoroughly at close range, while her joey watched us from her pocket. Sparrow was fascinated by the big "cat", especially after the one exhibit she'd liked in the Nocturnal House (the Spectacled Hare-Wallaby which was bouncing back and forth for quite some time). Unfortunately Sparrow still isn't very good at things like looking at what's in front of her feet before she walks somewhere, so she tends to walk straight over low things and fall a lot. She managed to walk straight into the wallaby and fall on its head, which it (understandably) took as a threat and prepared for fighting action. I wasn't there at that moment, having wandered off to the loo, and James described it when I returned as he and the wallaby having come to an agreement over the situation, involving mutual understanding that the wallaby was threatening his young. At any rate, the wallaby was peacefully eating grass close by and Sparrow was playing in a different space and all was calm.

The Paperbark Wetlands trail. General bird life and a couple of freshwater crocodiles staying well out of the way of those irritating mammals.

On the boardwalk in the giant walk-through aviary on the Monsoon Forest trail. This trail was really quite awesome. Lots of little viewing huts and cages along the trail, starting with the one that had an artificial monsoon downpour (and fist-sized golden orb spiders hanging in giant webs just where you wanted to stand and look). And then after a few of these, looking for birds, watching turtles, you got to this huge one. The sounds were amazing. The different kinds of pigeons and doves combined with the stone-curlews and others were really quite weird and spooky. And the lovely tall trees! We're up on the aerial part of the boardwalk here, looking down through the lower canopy. After this aviary the trail goes through some really pretty monsoon forest and explains the different trees, like the buttressed Sterculia and the Australian Nutmeg and lots of others. I was quite enjoying myself here.

We were starting to get a bit tired. So much to do here! And all so interesting and worth seeing. But you can't move too fast in this heat. So we opted to catch the shuttle train to our last stop, the Aquarium. This is James, Mum and Sparrow on the train as we're driving along.

For a lot of the Aquarium Sparrow didn't really engage with the fish - the display cases were just a little high. But there were lots of people, and by people I mean children under ten. She spent a lot of time following this family of kids around and watching them, occasionally getting distracted by a fish or two.

They have a lovely underwater tunnel in this aquarium and there was a swordfish just lying on it relaxing. They're eerie creatures anyway, and from underneath they just look strange. Sparrow was more interested in running up and down on the carpet, but she did have a look when her daddy encouraged her. The huge saltwater crocodile though wasn't even worth her glancing at. Possibly a good thing, who knows what nightmares it would have given her.

There was one series of exhibits she really did like though - the corals and the reef fishes. We could get her up to look more closely at those, and they were lots of bright flickering and swaying colours so I think she really enjoyed that. She "talked" a lot about everything she could see when we brought her to the window, and that's always a good sign.