Trip to the Zoo

Today all the families had a nice excursion to the Guangzhou City Zoo.  The guides said it was a good zoo, but small.  Its was only 20 minutes away and well worth the trip!  It seemed pretty large to us, and the access to the animals was fantastic!  Everyone is pretty tired and ready to head home.  We get our children's visas in a few hours.  So the end is in sight.  That made the zoo a great stop, a fine exclamation point to it all.  We only spent about 2 1/2 hours there and stuck with the outside animals.  But being able to  look right down on top of some black bears, and seeing a tiger eat very close, and elephants that were merely 20 feet away was amazing!  Plus all kinds of monkeys and giraffes were very close too.  The exhibits might be smaller than the Columbus Zoo exhibits we're used to seeing, and older, but we were so close I can't stop thinking about it.  In the elephant area for example they have a waste high railing and a concrete pit about 10 feet across and then about 5 feet of sharp rocks sticking up out of the ground to keep the elephants back, but that's it! No electric fence or wires, we could look directly into the elephant's eyes!  We watched nervously as one asian elephant found a spot he could walk on the sharp rocks and get a decent balance and lean across the moat with his trunk to reach the fresh green bushes he wanted to eat!  I was so afraid  he would fall in the moat and get hurt! His balance looked precarious! But he grabbed some fresh boxwood branches and walked away.  I got a classic shot of a tiger eating a slab of meat and licking his chops!  The only disappointment was the panda. We all wanted to see the panda, but they were repairing some welds on his cage and he wasn't out!  We were hoping to take a picture in front of him and send that into the travel section for the Columbus Dispatch, our local newspaper, so we settled for the lion instead.  Maybe we'll be in an issue soon! 

 

So now Laine is napping.  Christina found some knock off Coach bags and just returned from shopping, and I'm downloading the pictures.  A nap really sounds good. I think I'll join my daughter. 

 

Lastly happy birthday to my Mom and John Sabol!