Wednesday 16th January 2008 - I had to coax and bully Ishbel to get up this morning after a latish night and a busy day yesterday.
This morning we were headed for an early start at the zoo before it got too hot. We arrived at the zoo http://www.zooquarium.com.au/ at approximately 9:25am only to find it didn't open until 10. We headed for some local shops and sat in the car writing postcards before going round the lake and back again to the zoo.
After parting with a small fortune, we were in and what a fizzer it was. It's got a bit of a cheek calling itself the NATIONAL zoo. For that I'd expect something larger and with more animals. However, we did agree we'd enjoyed seeing the otters.
We were all done by the time the tiger feeding was due at 11am. We gathered over the tiger enclosure, getting hotter by the second. When the keepers came they said for $10 you could hand feed the tiger and for $15 you could get your photo taken doing so (I'm not sure if that was an extra $15, or inclusive of the tiger feeding).
Ishbel went into a deep sulk when I told her we were not paying $10 for her to feed a tiger. And I was right to say no . . . It was either way too hot or the tigers had been too recently fed, but neither tiger could be enticed to eat. A fair number of people queued up to hand feed. They seemed to have to sign away their lives but, again, nothing would encourage the tiger to come out from under its tree. We don't know if the people got their money back - we didn't wait, it was too HOT to hang about.
In the aquarium (blessedly cool) Ishbel spent most of the time in front of a tank that was getting cleaned out. A young woman in scuba gear was sucking up the stones with a pipe, sucking off all the dirt and putting the stones back. She was being closely supervised by a pig-nosed turtle.
2 days ago
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