Wild Animal Park

Today Nicky and I went off to the Wild Animal Park because I had free tickets that expire tomorrow so we decided we should use them! The Wild Animal Park is the breeding grounds for the Zoo and a tourist attraction in it's own right.

Some of the park is very similar to the Zoo where you just walk around and see the different types of animals individually in their (sometimes very large) enclosures while in another areas they have habitats that simulate the plains of Southern Africa or the deserts or North Africa and a bunch more. Unfortunately most of these aren't accessible unless you arrange one of the (expensive) photo safaris or something along those lines which sucks because there were some really cool animals that we missed out on! We went on a tram tour which took you past the South African savannah mostly.

The savannah is pretty much as close as you can get to going on a real safari without leaving America (which no doubt is good enough for some). They have all your major herbivores in a large enclosure together and so you get to see the animals interacting 'naturally'. Well natural is entirely relative if you consider the fact that there are no predators in sight, only a couple of each type of animal and the grass is super green. We did see some cool stuff though - like a 3 week old baby black rhino and the northern white rhino which is the most endangered rhino in the world - there are only 7 left and 2 are in San Diego which is pretty cool. Aside from that we saw some interesting Californian animals (the Californian condor and big horn sheep among others).

Here's the link to my facebook album. I put the pictures at the end of the Zoo and Seaworld album so you may have to scroll through to get to them.