Our last day in sunny San Diego was spent at the zoo.

Tara didn't end up coming as she wasn't feeling very well (I think some of that tequila tasting from Saturday night may have caught up with her =P) so Emma and I headed off pretty early, determined to spend the entire day wandering the zoo. And we accomplished this!!

They have some great animals and a pretty good setup (with the number of people through and the amount they charge, they can afford it!) but some of their animal enclosures are primitive and it's not very well set out. You have to go back and forth on yourself a lot which annoyed me a bit.

When we arrived, we got on a 30 minute guided bus tour. It was pretty good for showing what animals they had but we went in so many loops, it was no good for getting your bearings! The guy doing the tour reminded me of our Dad (lots of really bad jokes...although he didn't do your giraffe or hyena one, Dad...I considered offering them to him but figured he had enough of his own bad jokes already without me adding to them!). We then went to look at the reptiles. Emma has some great video of some of the enormous pythons moving around inside their enclosures....made my skin crawl...

After this, we saw a show, mainly to do with sealions. They get a young participant from the audience to feed a sealion some fish and he got a big kiss on the cheek and was not very happy about it!! They also brought out some macaws and an american wolf. We then saw the rest of the reptiles, tortoises and some Indian Ghirals which are like crocodiles and alligators. We then got the Skyrail to the other side of the park. The Skyrail is a chair ride that rides above the trees below. You can't really see any of the exhibits as they have so many trees in the park.

At the top, there is the Polar Bear Plunge exhibit. Both times we went to see the polar bears they were being boring and either eating with their backs to us or lying in the sun with their bums to us so we didn't really get anything exciting from the polar bears =P Walking down the hill, they have different kinds of deer, zebra, gazelles and the like and then a birds of prey enclosure. They are probably one of the most exposed exhibits and it was a bit warm today so most were off hiding in the shade somewhere.

We then walked along to see the Giant Pandas who were taken off exhibit (yes, the day was not going too well for actually seeing the animals we don't have in Perth!) as they clean out their exhibit of breakfast and anything that was left over from breakfast before serving them lunch so we decided to have lunch as well.

After lunch, they had just gotten back into their enclosure and the young panda dragged some bamboo over to a tree right in front of us and sat down, waving in the process (see photo...) The mother just sat at the back of the enclosure with her back to everyone munching away.

We then walked through Cat Canyon, looking at all the cats and the like. There was a show in the amphitheatres about predators and prey and myths associated with these animals. It included cloudy leopards, a cheetah, a badger and a kangaroo. We then headed through the forest (one of the exhibits which features mainly monkeys) to the Gorilla exhibit. They weren't really up for much and kept hiding as something was spooking them.

We also walked bear canyon towards the end of the day and the grizzly looked right at me while sniffing the air and I thought I was possibly going to be dinner =P We left just after closing time (by the time we finished shopping) and headed back to have dinner with Tara (who said she was feeling better) and then we decided to go see a movie (afterall, there is a movie theatre across the street) so we saw New in Town. Predictable but it was ok.

We were going to go to the pub tonight with some of the people from the hostel but they took too long to decide so Emma and I stayed. Tara ended up going for a whole 5 minutes...came back and said it was rubbish so we are going to go to bed and tomorrow we are off to...................

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(have you guessed yet?)

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(surely with the excitement you know now!!)

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(we're so looking forward to this...)

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DISNEYLAND!!

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(Did you guess?)