day91

Day 91 (November 19, 2006) - San Diego, CA

We are staying in San Diego to go to the world-famous zoo today. It's known as one of the best in the world. It's in Balboa Park, very close to our campground and we get there in no time.

We trace our own route on the zoo map and start walking. First stop, the primates: gorillas, orangutans and monkey of various types and from all corners of the planet (there are no chimps though, and no baboons...). Little tiny monkeys, big furry monkeys, funny-looking monkeys and goofy ones. The gorillas attract a big crowd. There are two babies riding on their mother's backs all the time. The big alpha male is sitting against the glass window with his back turned to us. I could sit and watch them all day long. Their movements and gestures remind me of someone I know... especially in their nose picking.

We soon realize that the SD zoo is also an amazing botanical garden. Plants, trees and flowers of many different varieties find a perfect climate here to grow and are well-suited for the various climatic zones the animals live in.

The tigers do not like to show off in public, and just like their smaller cousins the domestic cats, they sleep all day and prey at night. We barely see one of them as she goes into the den to rest. Next to the tigers are the hippos, one in particular is soaking in the pool today and looks at us with wide expressionless eyes from underwater.

The giant pandas are probably the biggest attraction in the zoo. We have to stand in line to go see them. Also the koalas attract herds of visitors. The are all so cute and cuddly! The polar bear is pacing back and forth, I think we maybe suffering a heat stroke - this is definitely not a good climate for him, the poor thing. And finally we get to see the grizzly bear up close and personal - a beautiful Alaskan brown bear - truly impressive in size with huge paws. we have been looking for bears in the parks all this time and now that I see one in all the safety of the zoo, I am glad we never encountered one in the wild...

There also lots of hoofed animals from the mesa, goats, bighorn sheep and their relatives - among them a species I had never seen before. Called klipspur, it's a small sweet mountain goat with big round eyes and tiny pointy hoofs that look like ballerina shoes. And many wild pigs and boars and their cousins. There is one in particular called the Central European pig (sur scrofa scrofa in Latin), that is very well known to Petr. He tells me that his brother once hit one of them by car in the middle of the night. Giraffes, African elephants, lions and rhinos (they really look prehistoric up close), tapirs and anteaters, deer, elks, reindeer, zebras, camels and dromedaries, wallabies and kangaroos, meerkats and prairie dogs, foxes and over 10,000 species of birds (we skip most of them, aside from the vultures, as we are not keen on them) and a reptile house with many poisonous snakes, vipers and lizards. I think we saw most of the fauna on this planet in one day.

We spend the entire day walking about and we don't even realize it's closing time. We leave the zoo and head back to the campground where we soak in the whirlpool to relieve the aches and pains in our leg. We talk about the day and what we have seen and reach a conclusion: it's most certainly a beautiful zoo, but there were a few things that irritated us. First, the annoying tour buses driving around the park. Although the zoo is big, it isn't that big that you need a (gasoline-powered!!!) double-decker bus to see the animals. The paths are all wheelchair accessible as well. By comparison, the one in Prague we saw last year is a bit bigger and we walked it all in one half day. Second, animals are not concentrated based on their species, rather on where they come from. This way if you are, say, interested in seeing big cats you need to walk all over the place to see them all.

Still, it was a very good day and we can go to bed and dream about grizzlies.