Tarra-Bulga

I need to finish my travel logs so that I can stop feeling like I need to post a travel log before I write anything else.

So let's finish up the travel logs.

Our second day in Prom Country, we drove to Tarra-Bulga National Park. The park includes a large temperate rain forest, with fern trees, myrtles, and tall mountain ash (eucalypts). As we drove into the park, the narrow two-lane road turned into a one-lane road, but still with traffic in two directions. And yup. I was driving. On the left.

You are asking yourself, if the lane is only the width of one car, then why does it matter whether you are driving on the right or the left? And you are correct, it doesn't matter so much. Until the other car comes speeding around the bend towards you, and you have to quickly pull to the... LEFT! Into the river at the bottom of the gorge.

Anyway, luckily the road was pretty empty, and almost all traffic seemed to be heading in the same direction that we were. So no car crashes. Only a handful of close calls. *Phew*.

Honestly, the biggest problem with the drive was the conversation in the back of the car. People kept calling the park "Terra-Bulga", with an "eh" sound. Or like Gone-With-The-Wind: "Tara". I told them that I would guess it was pronounced "Tar -ra". With long "ah" sound, since the A is followed by a double R.

These people all pronounce Tarra differently.

When we reached the visitors centre, we asked the two guys there at the desk how it was pronounced. And with their Aussie accents, they said something somewhere in the middle. I think the best approximation to what they said would be to give the A the same sound as in "cat". "Ta-rra". But they opened the vowel so it sounded closer to "Tara". Gone-With-The-Wind.

A few minutes later, we were sitting in the visitors centre watching the informative film. And the narrator said over and over what a lovely place "Tar- ra-Bulga" was. With the "ah" sound. Directly contradicting the two guys at the desk.

So nothing was settled. Nothing! So I'm sticking with "tar".

It has now been more than two weeks since we were in the national park, but clearly the pronunciation is still bothering me.

The other thing still bothering me is the elusive lyre bird.

The day before, my brother Bryan emailed the whole family and said that in 2017, he would be keeping track of all the birds he sees in the wild, and if we'd like we could turn it into a family event, sharing all the birds we identify.

The timing of his message was super convenient, because on our Wilsons Prom adventure, we were seeing four types of cockatoo (little corrella, galah, yellow-tailed black, sulphur crested), black swans, cape barren geese, Australian magpies,  two types of parrot (rosella, lorikeet), and even one morning a spectacular pair of wedge-tailed eagles that swooped low over our farm house -- an amazing sight!

Anyway, Tarra-Bulga was famous for being home to the super rare and super exotic lyre bird. And we were going to be there, in lyre bird territory, two days into Bryan's birding event! What timing!

So we looked it up: where had lyre birds been recently spotted? We walked all the walks -- the extra long loops. And then the extra long loop after that.

And we were rewarded with amazing views and an amazing experience!

Just no lyre birds.

Until the very end, when we heard one! We heard it! Making its loud distinctive call. It was just around the bend, hiding in the fern trees. Just right there -- probably only a few meters from the path!

But it was no good! No luck, readers. We identified the bird. We knew it was there. We knew its call. And we knew where to find it. But we did not venture off the path to whack through the underbrush to see it. We did not.

Why not? You may be asking. Why not just walk a few meters off the path for the chance to see a lyre bird in the wild? Among other reasons, because just a few minutes before, Jonathan had been startled by a very large black and red snake slithering across the path nearly under his feet. White faced, he ran back to us to tell us, and when we looked up its picture it seemed to be a red-bellied-black-snake, which is highly poisonous: "dangerously venomous and bite can be fatal."

So no bush-whacking for us.

(Honestly, the ferns were too dense for that anyway, snakes or no snakes.)

So Tarra-Bulga National Park. Spectacular. Amazing. "This definitely deserves to be a national park," said my dad.

But no visual on the lyre bird.

Curses!

We will have to go back.

("Go back when it's raining," said my colleague. "We saw dozens of them....")