Yesterday, we went in the car for a surprise day out. Once William had been dropped off at his school, we drove for about half an hour to get to Woburn. As soon as we drove past the sign we all realised what it was – the Woburn Safari Park! Tilly had been once before, but I’d never been. It was a whole new experience for me. We were given a map of the grounds with all the animals on it and where we should look out for some interesting ones. Unfortunately for half the time we were looking at the map in a ‘finish-to-start’ way, so we weren’t seeing the animals we did so expect to see! But when we finally figured it all out, it rolled along brilliantly.
We saw some wolves and bears, all in the same enclosure. We had to drive really slowly in case we hit any animals. There were black, sleek wolves, black bears, and white, shaggy, wise looking wolves. The black ones came and crossed straight over the road right in front of our car!
The grey ones seemed a bit more wild and naturally not very curious, so they stayed at the top of the hill, pawing the ground like they owned the place! The bears seemed quite content lying on tree stumps, sun-bathing like humans on their backs. One jumped off the stump and padded to the road, but when he got to the side of the unnatural gravel he turned and walked away.
There were lions and tigers and rhinos and the other big creatures. Sometimes, animals had to be kept in wire enclosures, and there were big sliding gates that kept them in their own habitats so they didn’t roam around the safari park all mixed together. There was a large male lion who had to be kept away from the lionesses (who were just prowling about by themselves) in a large cage, because he was new and they were only slowly introducing him to females in case of fights. We could still see him fine with his huge, shaggy mane, sitting on his huge rock in the middle of his enclosure. Occasionally I felt a bit sad that they were being kept away from the wild with only a limited place to go; but then I suppose they would die a lot sooner in their own habitats, in fights, or starvation, or something along those lines.
The monkeys deserve a new, new, new paragraph, I think! We drove though the gates and entered a world of paradise, filled with trees and the chirps of birds and the soft mud-sand gravel beneath our wheels. However, we couldn’t see the monkeys. ‘Is this even the right place?’ we were all thinking. But soon we saw a tiny rustling on the logs. There came a monkey! It had a long, slender tail and a funny, cheeky-monkey expression its little pug face. Then came another, and another, and another and another! Suddenly one appeared with a tiny baby the size of a small teapot on her back. It was hilarious! The baby monkeys who kept appearing obviously weren’t old enough to climb the huge thick branches of the trees, so they began to scramble about on the bushes and roots below. They were absolutely adorable! We never wanted to get past the gates. When our car was rumbling through, Tilly and I were scrambling about the car just in order to wave our arms about shouting, ‘Monkeys! They’re monkeys! Monkeys, don’t go!’
There was a ‘Foot Safari’ where we went around by ourselves without the car. There were more ‘domestic’ things like tortoises and snakes and so on, but the we didn’t see the snakes. They had a few talks and train rides, some of which we went on, but the best was the Paddle (or what we nicknamed Pedal) Boats, and the Mammoth’s Play Ark. The boats were shaped just like swans, and we got ten minutes on the huge algae-covered, clean lake. (Lakes look green often, but that is natural algae, which only arrives in clean, healthy water).
The Ark was amazing. It was one of those awesome indoor play areas, with those slides and balls and nets and inflatable poles and so on! There was a bumpy slide with balls and nets at the end of it with a slight drop, a massive, five-millimetres-away-from-being-vertical drop slide, a massive, five-millimetres-away-from-being-vertical drop slide a metre higher than the last, and a bumpy slide where you went down in a woven slack. Tilly just about managed to go on both drop slides, but I sat at the top of the smaller one thinking, ‘It’ll be over. It’ll never be over! It’s not scary. It will terrify you out of your wits! It’s not as vertical as it looks. It’s definitely vertical,’ and then eventually ‘No.’ It was quite a straight forward ‘no’ because straight after that I got up and went on the slightly drop slide and the sack slide.
When we got home, it was about dinner time. We were exhausted!