It's a Pratchett thing
Now to do some walking
3 September 2007
Just hanging around having a scratch
The zoo has had quite a number of births and we were well entertained by a pair of young gorillas chasing each other around their enclosure. The only problem was the crowd, and the sun on the glass which made photo opportunities limited. Never mind, we managed to do better with the orang-utans who are always impressive with their ability to just - hang - for seemingly hours.
From here we branched off onto the Grizzly trail which takes you out towards the Canadian domain.
It was a long slope down of over a kilometre and we were thinking about the walk back up again in the heat. There is a train that drives about but that is for fat people not us fit folk: gasp!
We were not really surprised to find the grizzly bear fast asleep in his concrete tube of a shelter. You know the grizzly is big and then you see one. Whilst not as large as a polar bear in total size, the head of the grizzly strikes me as being bigger. I think this one's nose was about the size of my head.
I could remember from my last visit that the zoo has quite a few bison and I was pleased to see that they were at least within viewing range - which the yak weren't. I like the idea of big paddocks in zoos but it is a real pain when the animals are blips on the horizon.
JJ was disappointed to discover that the wolves were well hidden. They have a large enclosure and could have been lying up anywhere. We stood and watched for a few minutes but there was no sign of movement.
Later on in our travels we came across a couple of what we would have called foxes and they were as exhausted as we felt.
Coming back out of the Canada trail we rejoined the African safari park which has a superb lion mound. Not only can you get up reasonably close on all sides, as you walk under it you can look up through the windows.
We went and looked at the giraffes and the elephants and watched the mountain goats on the Mayan rocks, but to be honest I think the pair of us were just too tired to really take everything in. There are drinks machines everywhere but some of them had run out of water and we were running out of change to put in them anyway.
We got out of the sun at one point by going into a tropical house to look at the snakes and crocodiles. JJ had an encounter with a python that seemed to be just as curious about him.
The only other thing that I wanted to do was go and look at the dinosaurs. We had already seen one beast of a thing roaring and waving its head and the zoo has a collection of animatronic dinos to entertain everybody. A little bit plasticky but what I liked was the fact that you could control some of them. You pushed buttons to program him to roar, move his head, arms and tail and then waited on suitable prey, before hitting: START.
With a bit of practice you could have terrified all the young children. Every house should have a T-Rex.
Once out of the zoo JJ could at last light up, but he had hardly taken two puffs when our bus pulled in and we were on our way back to the hotel and the swimming pool.
As we passed through the villages and towns we noticed that one of them was called Agincourt. Apart from the name it had little in common with our own Azincourt with its rolling green fields and cutout soldiers along the laneways. When Henry V won his famous victory in 1415 the idea of Canada was still another 200 years in the future.
See also