As a change from all the packing, cleaning and rushing around, my daughter-in-law thought it would be nice for us all to have a family outing before we left, so she chose Knowsley Safari Park, as our grandson was quite excited by the idea of seeing some lions.
We were not particularly early, so we went immediately to the safari area which you drive through in your car. It was not difficult to spot the lions when we reached their area because of the great queue of cars watching them sleep peacefully.
This scene is not unlike many I witnessed in the Nairobi Game Park where we often went in my childhood, the main difference being the colour of the vegetation. I've lost count of the many times I watched a pride of lions there lie sleeping peacefully during the heat of the day. It was rare to see them on their feet, though we did once when I was about 5 or 6. The whole pride were walking along the road beside the cars, and we were travelling in an old open car with a cloth roof and no windows (this was 1948 or possibly 1949). We were terrified, especially when one of the lionesses decided the front mudguard of our car was a great place to have a good scratch! We couldn't drive away because we were on a very narrow dirt road, completely hemmed in by other cars. And we didn't have a camera with us, so we couldn't take a photo! Mind you, all we had then was an old box brownie which wasn't great at taking photographs and hardly ever got used, and anyway I think we were all too terrified and concentrating on trying hard not to catch the lioness' eye; she was quite interested in us, looking into the car and we supposed she might be speculating as to whether we might be something that would constitute an acceptable dinner!
One animal I never saw during my childhood in Kenya was a rhino, so I was quite delighted to see these.
There are quite a few rhino in this safari park, so I think you have a good chance of seeing some. There are also supposed to be tigers, but we didn't manage to spot any in spite of looking very hard. My grandson was quite disappointed!
You can be fortunate and get very close to the animals.
This rather smug looking animal is an eland, another animal with which I am familiar through living in Kenya. I never got quite this close to one there though, they are usually more timid and nervous of people in the wild, which I suppose is natural if you have to beware, not only of predators with sharp teeth, but humans with sharp spears or else guns. Eland are very large and and consequently an attractive dinner proposition. Come to think of it, he's probably looking so smug because he knows he can look forward to eating dinner, rather than being dinner!
If you really want to get up close and personal with the animals, you can drive through the baboon enclosure. Paul and I elected not to do this, having lost both of our windscreen wipers to baboons on a drive through a safari park in Scotland about 40 years ago. However, my son was put under pressure by my grandson to get up close and personal with the baboons, so they drove through, and the car was soon completely covered with baboons, to my grandson's great delight. Fortunately they emerged later with windscreen wipers intact, perhaps because they elected to drive in my daughter-in-law's extremely elderly VW rather than my son's smarter car. I imagine the baboons are used to quality and expect a rather more expensive make of windscreen wiper, so they probably scorned something so decrepit!
The unusual animals below are Kiang, a wild horse from Tibet.
Apparently they are fairly new to the park and are said to have settled in well - I imagine the climate here is somewhat less testing than that in Tibet. They have been put into the area which also has bactrian camels and Père David's deer - I don't know if this makes them feel at home or not.
There's an area of the park you can walk round, and one of the great attractions as you go in are the meerkats.
They seem quite oblivious to the people, concentrating on the sky to see of there are any birds of prey. I wonder what they make of aeroplanes.
As we were so late, there wasn't time to see everything. The giraffes had already gone to bed, but at least we managed to see the elephants.
There were quite a few of them, but I think they were tired of people because they looked to me as if they just wished we would all go away and take our cameras with us.
I was glad to get a view of the capybara, an animal which I had never seen and always wanted to, ever since I read about it in a book by Gerald Durrell about 50 years ago. It's a big rodent, rather like a sort of chunky hamster, but the size of a large dog. It was so far away that I'm afraid my photo was rather disappointing, but at least I saw it.
My photographs of the sea lions were also quite disappointing, they swim so fast it's really hard to photograph the whole animal; I've got a lot of photos of just the tail, and when I did manage to capture the whole animal it was moving so fast it was usually out of focus.
I'd really like to go back on another occasion and spend the whole day there, instead of having to rush around so quickly, but anybody who reads this blog will know I really enjoy looking at animals; no doubt my grandson might get bored.
That was how we spent Saturday 27th. On Sunday we finished most of our packing, and on Monday we completed the cleaning of the flat and handed in the keys. We had intended to drive back to Oxted in the afternoon, but I suffered another kidney stone and we had to stay the night at my son's. Fortunately, it passed before I had to go back to hospital, and though I had another the next day, it was nothing like as bad and we drove home.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
No comments:
Post a Comment