Destination: Monarto! Lions, giraffes, meerkats ... on safari in South Aus

Lions of the Monarto pride...
A safari in your own backyard! Monarto "Zoo" is certainly not a zoo in any conventional sense of the word. The "enclosures are vast paddocks and the animals enjoy almost as much freedom as they would in the wild, as well as being utterly safe from poachers. Monarto has a small but growing pride of lions, and a couple of young females were close enough to the viewing platform for us to get some terrific pictures.

In fact, there are so many wonderful pictures to share on this post, most of them have been pasted in as thumbnails. If you'd like to see them at full size, just click them: everything is big; we just can't display them large, or this page would be ten yards long!

...at this point the lions meandered away to a patch of shade beyond the reach of cameras, so it was time to hop back on the bus, for a ride to the next part of the park:

Ride the bus around Monarto: very handy ... you buy one ticket at the gate, and then hop on and off the bus at whim,
stopping as long as you like at any one "paddock."

Hunting dogs: faaar away, at the extreme range of telephoto, and on the other side of a fence. Dang. But at least we got pictures... everyone else had left the area! Patience is rewarded.

Monarto's paddocks are connected by walkways to the main bus routes. There's a lot of walking involved, even if you do
hop on the bus the whole time. Wear your walking shoes ... and a hat. Shade is rare, and it can be very hot indeed.

Giraffes at Luncheon...

Giraffes are so pretty! They have the longest eyelashes you ever saw, and the daintiest legs. They're also very, very
shy, and skittish. We happened along just at feeding time, and the busload of eager photographers were
exhorted to be quiet and not make a big fuss.

Giraffes ... with femme fatal eyelashes, and eyeliner. They really are beautiful.

Below: other views in the Giraffe Paddock, which those tall folks share with some bovines whose horns are ... epic. These are eland and kudu. In fact, the bus will swing you through several vast "enclosures" where you really could believe you were on the savannah ... except for the fact those are eucalypts in the background rather than the acacias one would actually expect in Africa...

The giraffe viewing platform is -- well, elevated, which affords a great view of Monarto's giraffes. The animals come
right up to the platform, where the specialist will occasionally hand-feed a carrot while giving a layman's lecture on
giraffes in general and these gorgeous animals in particular. 

Now, we'll take the bus through herds of bovines ... the herbivores are separated out from the lions by tall fences and distance, naturally. Stock feed comes in by truck for the animals, since -- as you can see at a glance -- they "eat out" the graze immediately. (What are the lions eating? One almost hesitates to ask, but we could make a few rather unfortunate guesses. What else can you do?)

And in the background, behind the bus, yes: an ostrich, not an emu!

Meerkats on sentry duty ... and at play!

There's only one word you could use to sum up meerkats...

The word is, CUTE!

Back on the road, leaving Monarto and headed for Murray Bridge, Langhorne, Milang, Goolwa ...

Monarto ... covered in one post! The hardest thing about this one was figuring out which pictures not to upload, because there were so many fantastic ones, and then figuring out how to display more than fifty images on one post with some skerrick of coherence! Reiterating -- ALL the images were uploaded at large size, and to see them, just click on the thumbnails.

The park is enormously rewarding though the ticket price is quite high, as you'd expect. Be prepared to do a LOT of walking; do put on your walking shoes and take a hat because you'll be in the sun a great deal and it's almost certainly going to be hot, unless you brave the mud in the middle of winter!

Here's what Wikipedia says of Monarto:

Monarto Zoological Park (also known as the Monarto Zoo) is a 1,500-hectare (3,700-acre) open range zoo located in South Australia administered by the Royal Zoological Society of South  Australia Incorporated (trading as Zoos SA). It is located at Monarto approximately 70 kilometres (43 mi)  from Adelaide's centre.

The zoo features several unique attractions, including a drive-through cheetah habitat, a southern 
white rhinoceros habitat, and Australia's largest giraffe herd. It is also home to South Australia's largest  revegetation project. As of 2015 Monarto zoo has achieved one of the most successful giraffe breeding  programs in Oceania.

We enjoyed it enormously -- would recommend it, and will doubtlessly do it again one day. But as the shadows were lengthening it was time for us to hit the road again. We had a long way to go, and another day in which to do it!

Next time: Murray Bridge, Langhorne and Milang in the morning light...

Dawn at Milang, Breakfast at Clayton Bay, English 'dry stone walls' at Callington, then -- lions and zebras and bison, oh my!

Dawn rises over the wetlands at Milang, South Australia...

...and when we're staying over in Milang the day begins with a photo assignment --

You get up when the first flush of dawn colors appears in the sky, and...

...walk right across the empty main road outside the Milang Lakes Motel...

...and there's the wetlands, and the rising sun.

On this trip the sky was clear, which doesn't make for a brilliant dawn, so --

-- the challenge was to "get creative" with the shots, and... 

...make the most of everything we had to work with. In the end we wound up with so many good shots --

-- the hardest thing was paring them down to a scant handful to upload here!

The weltlands were alive with birds that morning -- 

-- and not one of them came close enough to photograph! So we said  "nuts" and --

-- went right back over to Clayton Bay, pronto, on another assignment: breakfast!

Sails at Clayton Bay is a marvelous cafe-restaurant, and

-- they're situated right there on the waterfront...

--serving the best breakfast you can imagine. This hit the spot. Yum!

Clayton Bay: "you are here." You can actually read the history on the board here, seen at full size.

Looks like a great day to be out on the water. Boats were launching e very few minutes --

-- from the boatramp right alongside the jetty, while...

...pelicans fished for their own breakfast along the riverbank.

But we have a date with lions and zebras, so it's already time to get out of Dodge!

Halfway over to Monarto, we stopped on Callington Road to capture a photogenic landscape. 

The Callington area is a picturebook landscape. It must be lovely in winter, when it's green. Must come back!

Callington would very likely have been settled originally by folks from the UK, because --
check out their "dry stone walls." These are commonplace ... in England's north-east, that is.

Art meets nature. Eucalypt trees shed their bank, not their leaves --
and when they do, sometimes you get an effect like abstract painting. Pretty!

At last -- welcome to Monaro Wildlife Park ... not a 'zoo' as we generally think of them.

Drive right up to the gates and inside. Buy tickets at the kiosk to the right there.
It's actually quite expensive; but then again, it must cost a fortune to run this place. So...

Walking up from the huge "parking pasture" you enter the wildlife park itself right here.

The way in is through the shop. Yep, we'll be stopping there on the way out.
Check out the giraffe skeleton. Wow. There's also a lot more skeletons: next post!

Monarto is home not only to African wildlife, but to endangered species from other continents.
These are Przewalski's horses, and here's what Wikipedia says of them: "Dzungarian horse is a rare and
endangered subspecies of wild horse native to the steppes of central Asia."
And the good news is, they thrive -- and breed! -- at Monarto in South Australia.

Likewise, America bison thrive here -- though they must wonder what happened to the grass.
Seriously, Monarto is a series of massive paddocks in which grazing animals run almost totally free,
and the fact is, they graze simply out the land. Now...

... if Monarto were four times the size, staff could afford to move the stock from one paddock to another,
rotating herds around so the recently-grazed paddock could lie fallow and recover. Alas,
 there's no such luxury, so these animals may run free, but they're fed fro the back of a truck.

The zebras thrive at Monarto, and breed readily in this environment.

And Monarto contributes to the world-wide breeding program which is right now
rescuing the white rhino, bringing it back from the thin edge of extinction.

Grant's gazelles run free ... and the dead giveaway that these are in Australia is
hopping along the fence at upper left! Yep -- kangaroos also abound in these paddocks.
Can't see him clearly? Check out this picture at large size!

Then, it's on to the lion enclosure...

Lions! This is what you wanted to see, right?
We have some great pictures, which we'll be uploading in the next post!

It's been ten years since we last visited Monarto, and we were surprised by the changes. It's much more developed than we recall, and one of the best changes is that they now have a very excellent shuttle bus "service" running round and around inside the park. The bus stops at various points adjacent to the viewing areas for giraffes or lions or whatever, and you can get on and off said bus as often as you like, so you could spend as long as you wanted in a certain place.

The park is 2,500 acres, which sounds like a lot, but if Monarto has one problem it's that it's about 25% as big as it really needed to be, if it were going to remain lush and green. True, it'll be greener in wintertime, but herds of antelope, bison and so on will graze out the paddocks. In the end, the stock will be "fed off the back of a truck." (Which, yes, is also true of local domestic animals -- cattle, sheep, horses, alpacas. Even camels, if you're sharp-eyed.)

It's very good to see species which are endangered in other lands doing well here. One can hope that in future the conditions may be right for returning the great-great-grand-offspring of these creatures to the wild.

The sun shone, we hopped off the bus here and there, and we came home with so many terrific photos, it was a major challenge to pare them down to a comparative handful for blogging. We're also going to cover Monarto in at least two posts, so --

Next time: lions, giraffes and a lot more!