San Diego Zoo!

This weekend, we used our Christmas money to buy ourselves year passes to the Zoo! For not much more than a regular ticket, this means we have unlimited entrances to both the San Diego Zoo and the San Diego Safari Park as well as free parking and discounts off food in the parks. 

These are two completely seperate parks (but funded by the same wildlife alliance) but they're about 30 minutes away from each other so it's best to do them on seperate days, especially as they're both so huge you really need an entire day for each. 

We drove to the Zoo first. It's right next to Balboa Park (where all the San Diego Museums are), but we had to drive through this really residential area and past a school to get to the entrance which was weird. The park opened at 9am and we were there by about 9:30am. We picked a random path into the park and started walking. Other than some little birds, the first animal we saw was an orangutan! It was raining that morning, so some of the animals were hiding away, but the orangutan was hanging out under the shelter of the windows. At one point it decided to go foraging across the enclosure, and used a burlap sack over its head to keep itself dry. 

We saw some other animals that weren't bothered by the rain like the spectacle bear and rhino and some who had nice shelters like the cheetah and a lot of koalas which were all asleep in their trees like little fluffy cannon balls. In the afternoon, the rain stopped so we got to see even more, including several polar bears! One was swimming in the lake and we could see it floating around from the viewing station below. The lions were also very active, chasing each other around and hitting the glass where people were standing. 

We'd brought lunch, but there were so many restaurants and several places selling only beer, which we found very unusual for a zoo! We did use our discount and got some soft pretzels in the afternoon which were tasty. 

The Zoo has a free tour bus which goes around the park which we didn't do this time, but we did take the Air Tram! This is a tiny cable car which goes high across the entire length of the zoo (which is long). 

Once we'd seen one half of the park we took this tram to the other side, but by this time it was already 4pm and the zoo closed at 5pm. We saw the reptile house and komodo dragons, but then had to go home. We're glad we left just a little early as we think it may have been really hard to get out of the car park any later. 

So, we still have almost half a Zoo to see! We still have tigers, chimpanzees, grizzly bears, hippos and crocodiles left; it's a good job we can go back whenever we want! It was immense, and even though there were a lot of animals, they all had a good amount of space and a lot of enrichment; they seemed pretty happy. We thought at one point that the leopards had quite a small enclosure, before realising that they had four which were all connected by overhead tunnels. 

It was a pretty tiring day, but Sunday we were up early again to visit the Safari Park! This was a bit  closer as it's not actually in San Diego, but a little north. 

Again, we arrived just before 9:30am and this time we headed straight for the Africa Tram. This is a free open sided safari bus which went through a huge enclosure filled with African herbivores. We saw giraffes, cape buffalo, rhino, zebras, gazelles and more. We even saw one of the giraffes steal a bucket of food from the ranger jeep, and then drop it and scare itself. Our driver would stop wherever there were animals and give us interesting facts about them and the conservation efforts done by the wildlife alliance. 

The view from the bus

Giraffes munching away

After this exciting adventure, we still had a whole park to walk around and experience too. We planned out our route so we could see as much as possible, but this Safari Park is smaller (in terms of animals, I'm pretty sure it's still the same amount of acres). It was sunny that morning, so it was a bit busier than the Zoo the day before, but very pretty. Everything was Safari themed, with thatched huts and wooden walkways over the lagoon. 

The highlights here were the gorillas who we caught playing, and the warthog which was playing with a ball in his paddock. They also had a lot of big birds like pelicans, condors and secretary birds, and small birds like bee eaters which had made a series of hole homes in the wall or built nests from grass in the trees in the aviary we could walk through. We also saw the elephants being fed and more rhinos roaming across their field. Unfotunately, even though they have a platypus we couldn't see it, even though we visited it twice. 

The rhino paddock is huge!

While most of the Safari Park was African themed, they had a whole section of Asian inspired decorations, with bamboo and sculptures where they kept the tigers. We did get to see these ones very close to the windows, but they were snoozing in the warm day. 

They also had a desert inspired area with the Californian condors and big horn sheep. These sheep were the ones we tried to see when we went to Borrego-Springs, but didn't, so it was nice to actually see some. 

We even had time to look at bonsai trees which made Mitchell very happy

This day we stopped for a new snack. We'd seen frozen bananas for sale everywhere they were selling drinks and ice-cream, so we decided to give them a go. They're put on a stick, frozen and covered in chocolate and sprinkles (or peanuts like Mitchell got). They were a little hard to eat, but nice enough. 

We finished with the Safari Park about 3:30pm, tired, but satisfied that we'd been able to see everything that day! The best bit was definitely getting to go out and drive through the animals which I can't wait to do again. 

We're so glad we got the annual passes, not just so that we can go back and finish with the Zoo, but we'd want to go back again anyway, and now every time we have a free weekend, you can bet we'll be there!

Lots of Love

Emily and Mitchell

xxxxxxxxxxxxxx