My day holiday to London Zoo

I was going to share my trip to the zoo with you all anyway, but as I found out about a little competition being run by travelsupermarket.com, I was even more inspired to do so. I know the zoo probably doesn’t sound like much of a holiday but, as you have probably guessed if you’re a frequent reader of my blog, Chris and I rather enjoy visiting the Zoo, and in this weather there seems little point in going abroad for some exotic holiday that student budgets don’t stretch to cover – hot weather, and exotic animals is as much of a holiday as I need this year! We are hoping to go to Cardiff at some point this summer, with my parents, but we have yet to book that and there was no guarantee that we would have been before the entry dates to this competition closed so, for now, it will have to be about the zoo ;)

On Friday 26th July we decided to go to London Zoo; the good thing about London zoo is that you can get 2 for 1 tickets so long as you purchase train tickets into London. Zoo entry costs £25pp, so buying 2 train tickets at £3.75 each (16-25 railcards are a God-send!) saved us a total of £17.50 when we got there. I would strongly recommend using the days out guide, especially as you can save on tickets for lots of different places too!  Back to the point of this post, though…

I live in Greater London, so not too far from Regent’s Park as the crow flies, although it still takes about an hour or so to get there not including the 20 minute walk from Regent’s Park station through the park, to the zoo. There are far worse walks to take, however; Regent’s Park is a wonderful ‘open’ space where it becomes easy to forget that you’re in central London, let alone footsteps from a haven of hundreds of animals. Believe it or not, when I was younger I didn’t particularly approve of zoos or anywhere which might enclose creatures from their wild habitat…I could always see myself working for the RSPCA or one of those animal welfare campaigning groups, but I grew out of that. I’m not saying that I grew out of supporting animal welfare, oh no, but I realised the extent to which zoos, in particular, are beneficial. It’s a sad time to have to admit that many animals are going extinct but it is true, and over the last few decades zoos like London have been working extremely hard to improve the environments they provide. Did you know that London Zoo participates in 160 breeding programmes and runs 11 of them?

Anyway, when we got to the zoo, we started off in the aquarium section. The idea was that the area would be air conditioned, and bearing in mind we arrived at peak sun, in the heat wave of the decade (possible exaggeration…I’m not to be held responsible for any miscalculation in weather reading…) shade and air con were exactly what we needed! Unfortunately this plan slightly backfired for several reasons:
♦ Reason number 1: everyone had had the same idea as us
♦ Reason 2: it was not shady, it was dark. Dark meant that there was special lighting in order to see the fish which gave off quite a lot of heat energy.

I didn’t mind, though. If there’s one thing I learned from my little trip to London’s Aquarium last summer, it’s that I find fish a lot more interesting than I ever expected to. I had the chance to sit for a while, and admire my favourite type of fish (not Cod!), which is the Regal Tang. It has such an air of grace around it, and is such bright and beautiful colours it is almost hypnotic!


Piranha are fascinating fish. If you have never seen one they appear to be glittery, but they are unbelievably dangerous creatures. They dart in and out for their food which means if another piranha gets caught in the nip, it’s simply seen as collateral damage and they do sometimes eat one another.

I always forget how beautiful poison dart frogs are, until I see them. They are easily the most photogenic creature in existence (in my opinion) and I think the photos I took portray this very well; I recently got an iPhone, and I think it actually takes better photographs than my camera! The blue frog is a poison dart frog, but I can’t remember what the orange coloured ones are. Both types looked very cute, as they are so little, but I wouldn’t like to risk stroking them! That’s one thing I love about the zoo, you can see dangerous animals in a controlled environment.

 

Speaking of dangerous animals in a controlled environment, if you have followed my blog for sometime you may be aware of how much I suffer from arachnophobia. Whilst in the bug house, we somehow managed to time it for the ‘spider talk’. This meant that we walked into the room to see a woman sitting there holding a red kneed spider; somehow I managed to stand close enough to take a photograph (although the zoom function came in handy, I can tell you!), but trust me, when she asked if anybody wanted to hold it, I ran a mile!


Beyond the weird and exotic slimy and eight legged creatures, of course, there were the traditional zoo animals which you automatically think of when you envisage the ‘Z’ word.
We primarily went to see the new ‘tiger territory’ enclosure as it has been advertised so much and was not there last time we went, but unfortunately when we got there, there was only 1 tiger to be seen (there should be 2, and we never did find out where the second was!) and he was snoozing. I did think the sign they had outside was quite funny though:

We missed the giraffe feeding by seconds, but it was okay as we did see it from a distance and it gave me just enough time to take a picture of them. They are such elegant animals, which actually don’t seem to make much scientific sense to a novice like me, with their super-long necks, and unusual stature, but beautiful all the same. I never feel a trip to the zoo is complete without giraffes.

Ever since the ‘compare the market/meerkat’ adverts, meerkats have understandably gained an increase in popularity. The ones at London Zoo on Friday were extremely adorable – I had only ever seen them playing in their glorified sandpit, but on Friday they came right up to the window to say hello!



I can’t list every single animal I saw, as we would all be stuck on this page forever but I hope I gave a little insight into my holiday day out. I had such a wonderful day and until I can afford a holiday outside of the United Kingdom, little day trips here and there will suffice for now.
If you are a blogger and interested in entering this Money Supermarket competition, then check out their website (http://www.travelsupermarket.com/c/holidays/holiday-postcards/) for all the terms and conditions. I would love to read other people’s entries!