White tigers, Koalas, and Pandas, Oh My! 8/30/2009

Today was sight seeing, and we chose to visit the Safari Zoo. It took a while to drive there, but was well worth it, at least for Todd and I. FuJiao wasn't quite herself, and we are guessing it's from all the shots she had yesterday. She wasn't too interested in the animals until she got a little lunch in her, and then she perked up some.

The zoo was very big and very nice. Lots of the old favorite animals as well as new-to-us kinds in cool habitats. The fun part was how they let you feed the animals. You can buy leaves for giraffes, bananas for elephants, etc. and you are close enough to feed them. The giraffes are used to pulling leaves off trees so they'd pull pretty hard and rip the branch right out of kids' hands. FuJiao is so small we figured they'd eat her right along with the branch! They were giving elephant rides, which we passed on, but we did pay to feed the baby tiger! It seemed like the chance of a lifetime, even if it did last about a whole 30 seconds. The only things going through my mind were "look at the paws on this thing", "hurry and take a picture", and "sounds like the bottle is empty and I'm scared for what they do when they run out of food!". It was crazy, but very cool! The koalas were all sleeping (big surprise there), except they'd wake up long enough to stretch and fall asleep again mid-stretch. They have the only know koala twins at this zoo. The pandas were awesome! They just sit there with their fat bellies chomping down bamboo. They are very playful with each other and just fun to watch. It was neat to see so many pandas at one time.
After walking around the whole zoo we took a train ride, which was way better than any we've been on. It's actually almost like another zoo. Cars can pay to drive through as well There were tons of animals you didn't see in the other part of the zoo. We really liked how they'd throw food to the lepards, tigers, wolves, etc. as you drove by so they'd run and play. It was much more exciting to see active animals at the zoo instead of sleeping ones, with the exception of the koalas!

There was a big thunder storm starting when we got on the train and while we were going it really started to pour. It was easy to see why everything is so green here with the amount of rain that came down. Cool plants in this area include banana trees, bamboo, and many tropical flowers. This city is called the flower city and even though it's a big, dirty city you still find many flowers. The pillars of the overpasses are sometimes covered in vines and there are miles of highway with a flowering plant along the tops of the barricades.

We headed home and were all very tired. Dinner, showers and we are ready for bed.