Friday, August 1, 2008

Night Safari

Our friends from Japan the Mattheson's came to visit us here in Singapore so we had A LOT of fun last night going to the zoo's night safari. The first entertainment of the night was this fire show which pretty much consisted of mostly naked men chugging kerosene and blowing it out to produce a lot of fire. It was actually a really entertaining show because the performers were getting really into it and they were laughing and spitting kerosene on each other and taking off audience members shirts (yeah....) and blowing mini wooden spears at various sensitive body parts. After that we went on the actual night safari where we saw all kinds of really cool animals in the dark like tigers, lions, rhinos, bearded pigs, golden jackals, hyenas, etc. There were actually too many animals to remember. What I liked though was it had a lot of species native to the Indo-Asian region that you wouldn't see in an typical American zoo. Like the Malayan Tapir which I had never seen before (below). Or the babirusa, which is a very strange looking pig. Anna and I decided to go off from the main group and take a walking tour. The craziest things we saw were bats that kept flying over our heads and flying squirrels, which believe me, are a lot faster than normal ones. And yes, I am a little afraid of bats.
At the end of the tour, they showed us this grassland with all these deer. Anyway, the green vegetation was completely wiped out. The point of this dead pasture/field area was to demonstrate how most of the rainforests will look if we continue to ruin the environment. Now I am a conservationist, at least I try to be, but this lady was crazy. She kept repeating "reduce, reuse, recycle" over and over again and her voice got very shrilly when she was talking about the dead earth. She was assuming of course the earth was already DEAD and that we the safari people were the ones who KILLED that specific patch of rainforest. It was really quite depressing...kind of ruined the magic of the whole journey. But I guess it did make me feel guilty, which is good???
So if you ever want to see a simulation of an Asian Riverine Forest or Burmese Hillside, this is the place to go. As long as you can stand the sad ending.

1 comment:

Tinadakis said...

I'm jealous that sounds so cool