Tuesday 19 March 2013

One magical sunlit day at the zoo

After the family visits we had a fully 'holiday' day, going to the zoo!  I've been meaning to take Marisca to the zoo for a while, and we were rewarded with a very happy little girl.  It amazes me that she remembers things so well (she still tells me about going to the station to see Toby, and that she had a ride, and that she rang the bell,  ding ding ding).

She talks about the gorillas as one of her bests.  She loved that there was a mummy, and a baby (pictured) as well as a very big daddy who fell asleep.  Everyone else in the area loved that she pointed at the big silverback and said "That's you, daddy".


She won't remember this, it was just llamas.  But I like her peering over the wall.


Before we left in the morning, Marisca said there would be monkeys and horses at the zoo.  We found both, and she even got to ride the horse!  What a very lovely cute little carousel.


Meerkats (plus Marisca doing a decent impression).  "There were 8!"


One of the elephants.  There were four, and one of them scraped her trunk around on the wall, looking to pick up some tasty treats.  I'm not sure why she remembers that particularly, but if we ever mention elephants now, she talks about scraping.


Ah, the real favourite.  A baby spider monkey.  We stayed here for a long time watching it swing about, climb up, and fall down.  Lovely.



Lastly, I can't allow the trip report to finish without talking about the noisy monkeys.  Twycross has (or is?) the world primate centre, so it was all about the monkeys (and apes, etc, but Marisca was really just calling them all monkeys).  Bonobos, chimps, gorillas, orangutans, teenytiny monekys, all quiet, all swinging or lumbering, all admired.  Gibbons, however... What A Racket.  A really amazing noise as they start screeching and howling in all kinds of ways, maybe 30 of them all at a time, the sound starting with a couple of calls and building to a cacophony like a carpark full of cars with their alarms all blaring at once, in an echo chamber.  It was amazing.  And, if you're 2, terrifying.  


So now we talk about how much we like quiet, swinging monkeys.  It was a great day.

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