We took a trip to Melbourne to stay with a friend of ours and stayed at his beautiful place in Richmond. The main purpose of our trip (apart from visiting Brian and Kim!) was to see the tennis, but we spent a lovely sunny day at Melbourne zoo.
It's considerably bigger than Canberra Zoo and whatever your opinion about zoos (and I accept they're a bit dubious despite their efforts to justify themselves as bastions of animal conservation) it was really well presented. There was lots for the kids to see and do and we ended up spending an entire day there and still didn't see it all. The newer enclosures seemed to be thoughtfully laid out and there was no sign of my experience of zoos from when I was a kid with mentally impaired tigers pacing up and down or folorn looking orangutans looking out from a glass cage not much bigger than a phone box.
Rather, things like the butterfly enclosure were a particular hit (I think we were there for over an hour) and we saw a lot of talks including an excellent one about Australia's own fairy penguins.
Here's some pictures of our sunny day.
 |
| The kids pretending to be giant turtles |
 |
| butterflies |
 |
| Audrey strokes an albino snake |
 |
| Penguin feeding time |
No comments:
Post a Comment