This place was amazing. The rules in China are a bit more "relaxed" to say the least. To start off with, you take a motorized tour around the park. The animals get close to the vehicle in some areas and in other areas you can see the animals from a pretty short distance away. It was something else. Then you take the walking tour. This is where the excitement begins.
Being China, they have a lot of pandas. More pandas than I could count. At this time they did not have any babies, but they do have a panda nursery where they have incubators for the babies. They showed us the panda kitchen and we saw many different types of pandas. We were just a few feet away from these amazing creatures. Mike loved the pandas!
Owen's middle name is Hu, which is the Chinese word for tiger. It was the name they gave him when he arrived at the orphanage. We were told he had beautiful eyes and a round face like a tiger. It is also the name of the president of China, and they consider the tiger to be the king of the animals...Owen had a very important name in China. Mike and I were also born in the year of the tiger so you can probably guess that tigers hold some significance for our family. We loved the tiger section of the park. Matthew was so excited to see the tigers. He wanted to play with them. We saw white tigers, we saw golden tigers, we saw tigers of every color and size. We did get to see many baby tigers, and one that was teeny tiny and in an incubator. The white tigers are simply beautiful.
Now you might not know how much I love giraffes, but I do. They are my favorite animal by far. There is an area of this park where you can feed the giraffes. Not just one giraffe, a whole heard of them. I told Mike that if I did not see anything else in this place that I did not care-- I was going to feed those giraffes! I even was able to touch a giraffe. They have kind of stubble on their faces. And, I got spit on by a giraffe. How many people can say that?
It was certainly the experience of a lifetime!
