Day 5, Beijing Zoo

We spent the whole day at Bejing zoo. It was not as bright and sunny as the other days, but that was fine as we were outside a lot! It was a great day to test out our camera, as many of the photos we took of the animals from quite far away look fantastic when zoomed in. We saw loads of beautiful animals; giraffes, zebras (Sarah stroked one!), monkeys, a HUGE lion, tigers, tortoises, a Burmese python, rhinos, hippos, elephants, I could go on...

Sarah liked the brown bears- the way they walked ("plodded", says Jack), reminded her of Bruce! It was really weird, there was a 'Dog' section in the zoo- our strong advice to Brits is to avoid this part. Dalmatians, German Shepherds, Afghans, even a huge St Bernard, all in stark horrible cages. We saw a guard kick one of the dalmatians and were very unimpressed.

To tell the truth, we were quite shocked at the condition of many of the animals and their enclosures. It was obvious that many of the animals were very agitated- on tiger was running back and forth the 3 or so metres of it's cage really frantically. The rhino was banging it's head against the rails, and not one of the enclosures had any water for the animal- except for the pandas and the amphibious animals. However, it is a very famous and well-regarded zoo, so I suppose they know what they're doing. We did get very annoyed at the people throwing rubbish and stones at two sleeping lionesses, trying to wake them up. All of the outside enclosures were covered in rubbish, obviously thrown by visitors trying to get the animal's attention.

Having said all this (it sounds like an RSPCA report!), we did have a lovely day. The tigers were beautiful, and we saw Giant Pandas! They were very cute, they kept rolling around and falling over. It was a really great zoo for getting up close and personal to the animals- Sarah even had her photo taken with a chimpanzee named Betty sitting on her lap!