My Pets

 

That’s of course the male lion at Taronga Zoo, where we decided to visit today, and take a look around at the various animals on display.

The Lion in the above picture is really cool! They keep them in behind ‘glass’ type cages, so you can see them in full view.

The bear wasn’t very playful, and didn’t seem to have any other mates to play with. So, I was curious what they do to keep them ‘social’. Perhaps captivity isn’t about maintaining social aspects.

No visit would be complete without of course meeting Dumbo. The elephant with eyes that look like he has been eating some grass of a questionable source, and a smile that stretches from ear to ear.

Dumbo looked very happy munching on the grass, and I have a few guesses why, perhaps he is content with his environment, or perhaps his smile was unintentional. Still a good view of an elephant.

We actually have a group of pictures for this one, where he is picking up, eating, and coming back for more. This was perhaps the not the best of them, as there is one which makes him look a lot happier, but I skipped it.

I was curious how much these two charge for cleaning gutters, as I simply don’t want to go get a ladder and do it myself. They didn’t seem to give a price, but they weren’t willing to do it for free for some reason.

The giraffe exhibit was a bit packed due to feeding and a demonstration in progress, but we did manage to fetch some good pictures of those two.

 

For some reason, we couldn’t get through this wire fence to get to the stepping stones in the water to get to the other side. Not sure why that is, there was nothing to suggest we couldn’t go through, just the wire fence wouldn’t open. Oh well.

 

The seal seemed to be one of the most active animals there, swimming, and surfacing continually, and ‘blowing’ water from it’s mouth. Very active, very playful animal.

Unfortunately they had closed the seal theatre exhibit, where they show you activities with the seals, as it was undergoing redevelopment.

Parking was also not nice there at all!

The drive down was good, with exception of a few wrong directions, but on the whole we did pretty well for our first time down in Sydney (and my first time driving in Sydney). The trip was intended to get familiar with some parts of inner sydney, so I can drive those comfortably, but it seemed a little pointless driving 3 hours all up for a ‘getting familiar’ trip, so we also decided to get a little more familiar with the Zoo too, which was only around 15 minutes or so away.

The traffic flow in Sydney is a little awkward, for example, many of the roads there mean you are able to reach out the window and kiss the passenger in the car beside you, there doesn’t seem to be much breathing room – amazingly there are still a chunk of 4WD/ SUV vehicles on the road with not a single scrap of mud on any of them – yet, hit by another car, or hit by another 4WD, the passengers inside could face severe roll over damage. Some people are just pure idiots. It’s like a news item I read recently, it was titled in such a way it read US gives Kosovo weapons to create peace.

Yep, throwing weapons at something sure generates peace. Not. That said, give me an AK47, and I am sure I’ll have peace. A lot of peace. And a fantastic ‘peice’. Funny title, funny news, stupid government though.

Anyway, the Sydney trip down to gain familiarity wasn’t a successful trip, it was incident free, but due to the wrong directions (ie.. turning off the freeway some 50kM sooner than we should have – sorry, my human GPS isn’t accurate) we couldn’t get accurate timing for the raw trip down, not to mention that but, the chosen car park, we couldn’t find the exit to as well, which sort of sucked, but we got the trip back nutted out, and I reviewed the maps myself (never rely on a human GPS), and I can see the trip down is just as easy, it was just made difficult due to wrong directions from the GPS.

The Zoo was a fantastic day out, and really is a great sight to see if your looking to fill in time, have something to do when there is nothing else to do, or simply ‘for the animals’.

Enjoy!