Safari: China Style

(This is part 1 of 2 posts about our Safari day, because good grief if I didn’t take 270 pictures.)

This past Tuesday on The Trip That Never Ends, our tour guides took us to a “Safari”. We were expecting a safari in the middle of a Chinese city of 14 million people to closely resemble a zoo, and we were half right.

And then we climbed aboard the little choo choo train for a ride through the area without all the cages. And though I’m not a huge zoo fan (they just always look so sad in the little bitty “habitats”), I gotta admit that the safari portion of the day was pretty cool.

We saw several unidentifiable animals, bears, giraffes, zebras, white tigers, lions, deer, rhino, and lots of birds out in wide open spaces. I’m used to going to the zoo, and maybe getting a small glimpse of one of the two bears in the whole exhibit. I’m not used to seeing entire communities of bears and zebras and wildabeasts wandering within several feet of our open train. We once had to stop the train because an ostrich had wandered in our path.

I have to admit, I have no idea what a couple of these animals were, but they didn’t seem bothered by us visiting.

Everybody has a water buffalo.

I could not look at this guy without singing the Veggie Tales’ water buffalo song in my head.

Despite the bazillion pictures I have to the contrary, the safari portion of the day lasted a little over an hour. We still had plenty of time to see if the giraffes liked to eat little Chinese girls for lunch. Stay tuned for Part 2...