Zoo time!

Sorry for the delay in the posting...

Last weekend we took our first bus trip and went to Fuengirola and they just happen to have a zoo! I desperately miss the National Zoo so this was a treat for me. Fuengirola has a relatively newly built zoo, the animal enclosures were really well done and have a very naturalistic feel to them. Overall the zoo is on the small size, but not bad for city. No volunteers though, and they really could have used them for explanations and to keep the people from banging on the glass and worse, throwing food to the animals!

One of the most fun features, something we would never see in a US zoo, is that visitors are able to go inside the animal enclosure with the lemurs. We both loved this and actually went on the tour twice! They had 3 types of lemurs (all of which got up nice and close for photos) Ringtail, Black and White Ruffed, and Red Ruffed lemurs. One of the ringtails had a 6 day old baby clinging to her and they came up to Justin and grunted at him, it was great!

We (of course) spent some quality time with all the primates. They had 2 gorillas on view, which I thought was kinda a small troop size. They were pretty much being energy minimizers and spending their day lounging in the sun. The zoo did have a good group of chimpanzees. Neither Justin or I have seen chimpanzees before, so this was exciting. One of the moms had a young baby, who was just the cutest thing ever to watch. Adorable! They also had an orang mom with a baby... they had some of the best hairstyles ever. Oh and hanging out with the orangs were 4 otters, a strange grouping but they didn't seem to bother eachother. I wonder what Em would think of living with a pair of orangs? Not the mention, that I wonder what the orangs think of the otters. I was surprised that they didn't keep going over to them and picking them up. Oh and I couldn't forget the gibbons, there was a family group of white cheeked gibbons, with another baby clinging onto her mom! I can't get enough of primate babies, too cute!

We visited the bird enclosures, one of those open air kinds, they always freak me out. I don't like the idea of birds having the potential to fly at me or to peck my eyes out. Needless to say, I rushed thru this exhibit quickly. One highlight was the bats hanging from the ceiling, and get this the bats were called flying foxes or in spanish zorros voladores, that is a pretty cool name. Hmmm... lets see, we also saw tigers, Nile Crocodiles, hogs with tusks, flamingos, porcupines, a pygmy hippo and meerkats. The meerkats were very exciting to watch, we kept coming back to go see them. They had about 4 juvenile meerkats in the enclosure. I don't know what is with all the babies at the zoo, but you will not hear me complaining about it.

After visiting the zoo we went out for some tapas (Taberna del Pintxo), it was a tapas selectas? Basically they kept coming around to the tables with different dishes and you would take one if you wanted. It reminded me of that sushi on conveyer-belt place we went to in Portland with Russ and Jaci. In a similar style the food had different colored toothpicks that corresponded to the price. All I can say was that it was very tasty.

After that we pretty much headed home. Got home early enough in the evening to try another bus ride, this time we went to Puerto Banús. Our guidebook tells us this is one of the flashiest marinas on the Costa del Sol, with many floating palaces docked. We walked around, saw the flashy yachts and cars, and went out for a late dinner at Don Leone.

Sunday we spent a lazy day, hanging on the beach and working on Spanish. It was finally nice and hot and Justin took a chilling dip into the sea!