Barrington Tops Trip

I have been meaning to blog about quite a number of things for a while now and I've decided to start here with my trip up to NSW to deliver some devils.

I flew up from Hobart with a biologist, Judy, and 5 devils. Our first stop was at the Australian Reptile Park in Gosford where our devils were being delivered. The ARP is a bit of a misnomer, having at least as many furry and feathered residents as scaly ones, and not all the scaly ones are very Australian either. The ARP has two devils on display in the park, around 25 in the breeding enclosures behind the park, and another 80 at the off-site series of mini Free Range Enclosures (FREs) at Barrington Tops.

I have lots of photos of both the public area of the park and the behind the scenes parts, but for the sake of that piece of paper I signed a year and a half ago, I've only uploaded the public area photos.

One of the above crocs is real, the other fake - spot the difference.

P.S. my favourite is the Galapagos turtle.

After we left Gosford, we drove for what felt like days and arrived at Scone for the night. We had tea at a local pub and stayed the night in the motel before leaving very early the next morning to drive up to Barrington Tops. On our way up the mountains (believe it or not, Barrington Tops is at the top) we were nearly run of the road by a police car going the other way very fast around a blind corner, but we made it safely to the devil facilities. We were shown round by a very dedicated devil keeper and I got to see a couple of devils that we sent up for last summer's breeding season.

As the whole of the Barrington Tops Facilities is off limits to the public, I'm not uploading any of the photos, so you'll have to take my word for it that it is a lovely patch of bushland.

Then we drove for what felt like days again to get back to Sydney. We stayed the night at a hotel that was practically inside the airport and got up early to catch our plane back to Tassie. Of course, we were then delayed by 4 hours, but we did finally make it home. And we weren't the only ones waiting at the airport, we were sharing the lounge with the Wiggles back up dancers and Jack Vidgen, all headed from the Carols in Sydney to the ones in Hobart.