Lions, Tigers and Bears!

Today our youth group went on a trip to the zoo! Throughout the whole week we were worried about the weather, as it had been raining all week right up to the night before Saturday. It was raining heavily last night, and we were not looking forward to today, as we would have to walk around the zoo in the rain wearing ponchos and jackets!

Surprisingly though, the weather was perfect this morning! We arrived at church early in the morning to meet up with the others, had a little prayer and then we headed off to the zoo.



The zoo car park was full, which was unsurprising considering the perfect weather! We were lucky to find a car park inside though. We met up with the others at the entrance to wait for a few more before going in. It was decided that Nadine and I would be the two 'adults' as part of a 2 adults + 2 children deal (our children were Ruth and Ivy!). Apparently one of the ladies at the counter beside us asked one of the others in our group how old us adults were!



The first animals we saw were the kiwis! They were in this dark enclosure with red lights inside so that we could see where they were. We weren't allowed to do flash photography so we didn't get good photos. Of course Grace forgot to turn her flash off though! Uh oh! Luckily no kiwis died though!



We passed the red panda enclosure where the red panda was high up in the tree and barely visible! It was a little fitting, seeing a panda (albeit a red one) since we just watched Kung fu Panda last night!

There was this really weird pig that was being taken all around the zoo. It looked as though it had teats dangling from its chin!

We went into this building which looked quite new, which had windows where you could see something that resembled an operating theatre. I'm guessing that's where the vets operate on animals. It sorta made me proud to think one of my best friends Diane does that sort of thing and will be doing even more of it when she graduates at the end of this year!

Next, we saw some otters lying around before we came across the tiger! In one enclosure the tiger would wander up to the glass window and walk away, then come back!

In the larger enclosure there was a tiger who was playing with a giant barrel at the top of something that looked like a cliff.

We then had a walk through the Aussie animal enclosure, seeing some kangaroos, emus and peacocks and other Australian birds.

There were a whole lot more birds to check out!

We then saw some monkeys which were very entertaining! They were dangling from their tails and playing with each other.



There was one fat monkey who didn't seem all that interested in playing though! Some liked to slide down ropes too.

There were all these other kinds of monkeys too, including one that looked like Beethoven!



We also caught a glimpse of a few baby monkeys, which hitched rides on the backs of other bigger monkeys.

The weirdest thing we saw at the zoo had to be two tortoises going at it! Well...we couldn't be too sure, but one was climbing on top of the other very, very slowly!



We could have watched them all day, but Gabrielle pulled us away, so we had to move on. We saw some crocodiles and alligators and some orang-outangs on the way to the meerkat tunnel!

We were all quite excited about the meerkat tunnel! However, it didn't live up to our expectations. For a start, the tunnel was quite small so we had to crawl through them.

We also couldn't see any meerkats through the windows either! By the end of the tunnel I couldn't wait to get out! When we got out, we saw a meerkat just lying there around the corner from one of those windows! One of the signs read:

"The meerkats get fat from the food you feed them"

or something like that!

We all took a rest as Tim wasn't feeling too well after the tunnel experience.

We moved on to check out the otters and penguins (sadly no emperor penguins!)

 before we realised Tim was still behind with the other group leaders, so we waited for a bit longer before they rejoined us.

We came to the hippo lake and saw two hippos! It was really cool. I have to say I was looking forward to seeing the hippos! Most of the time they were under water, until one of them climbed out of the water!

We were getting closer towards 3pm when we were going to leave, and we were also reaching the end of the zoo. We saw the elephant Burma (Kashin died right?) who stunk really badly. I didn't realise elephants are hairy!

To finish off the zoo experience we went through the African enclosure where we saw lions, giraffes (Ruth's favourite) and zebras. Gabrielle discovered that the stripes on the zebra aren't actually black but are brown!

While we waited for some parents to come, we hung out in the kids' area, where some of us tried going down the long slide. 

We also climbed all over this dragon, 

while Hamish tried planking it...

Sadly our zoo trip had come to an end. We split up and made our way back to church. We originally thought that was the end, but then we heard that Karvin was buying hot chips for us all! Amazingly it finished quite fast!

To burn all that fat off, we had a good game of soccer before we had to go home for good!