Second day in Singapore

Time to write about our second day in Singapore. The Smiths are very much zoo people. Whenever we are in a new place we always have to check out the zoo. Singapore was no exception since it is known for being one of the best zoos in the world. I had read about the Breakfast with Oragutans program that you could buy tickets for. It was highly recommended so I went ahead and reserved some spots. So we got to go have a nice breakfast buffet and after about 20 minutes the zookeepers brought out a family of orangutans that sat directly in front of our table and they ate their breakfast right along with us. They were close enough for us to touch. It was really neat.

After our breakfast we started to explore the zoo. The Singapore zoo is an "open concept" zoo. When I read about it the explanation was, there is minimal space and barriers between visitors and the animals (except for dangerous animals of course). I assumed that meant no bars on cages and no glass but it goes beyond that. When we first walked into the zoo, this monkey was sitting on the welcome sign above us.
He was not behind anything, he was not attached to anything and there was no zookeeper keeping an eye on him. The further we walked the more we realized there were monkeys loose all over the zoo! Gibbons, spider monkeys, tamarins, all sorts! There were also ropes crisscrossing above throughout the zoo where the orangutans climbed overhead all day long, free to go wherever they wanted. It was unbelievable.
The Singapore zoo also has shows throughout the day, kind of like sea world. So we caught the sea lion show, the elephant show and the monkey show. They also have animal rides so James and Abigail wanted to ride an elephant.
The other part of the zoo that we really enjoyed were the "walk-throughs". In the Australian "walk-through" there was a winding path and as you walked there were kangaroos hoping along right next to you as well as various species of deer and pigs. I'm not sure it was allowed but we saw a boy reaching down to pet a small kangaroo so James decided he would try while I held my breath and quickly took a picture.

My favourite walk through was called the "fragile forest" and had wildlife from southeast asia. We had lemurs, sloths, monitor lizards and bats right next to us. It was so hard not to reach out and touch them because there is nothing between you. Mark was in monkey heaven, but I really loved the bats (Malaysian flying foxes).



So, another great day in Singapore.

It has taken me way to long to get these posts done. I am going to post a link to see more pictures of our week if anyone is interested.

We have a busy weekend ahead of us and I will blog on Sunday so that I am all caught up and posting about current stuff instead of what we did almost a month ago.

Love from Suzhou until next time.