Taman Safari

Ok, so I will get to the title of my post soon, but first I need to crow a little bit about directing my taxi driver home from the supermarket. Every other time the driver has known where to go, but this one didn't, so I gave the directions. I said things like kanan (right) and kiri (left) and terus (continue) and even though we went a longer way because I was following the angkot route that I know, we made it! Hopefully my former year 8 students will agree with me: it pays to know your kanan from your kiri ;-)

On to my main topic - because we have a week off school for the end of term 3, we went on a day trip to Taman Safari, which is a safari park (that's literally what the name means!) in Bogor. All my googling and wikipediaing told me it was halfway between Bandung and Jakarta, although if you put all three into google maps you will see it is closer to Jakarta! After a much longer and bumpier drive than I expected our two vans full of teachers arrived, and parked next to a matching van from one of the other Bina Bangsa campuses in Jakarta. Small world, huh? The first part of the park is a 'safari' where you drive through various enclosures, feeding some of the animals (llamas, camels, zebra, deer, a cranky ostrich, buffalo-type things with REALLY big horns and so on) with carrots that you can buy on the road before you get to the park, whilst taking care not to feed some of the others, like the tigers and lions and bears!

We bought lots of carrots!

 These ones are good to feed, although one of the buffalo nearly dinted our car to get to some more carrots!

And this one is not good to feed!

Once you've seen all the safari animals, there is a theme-park type section with food, rides and more exhibits. I was very disappointed that the komodo dragons were off display because their enclosure was being renovated :-(, but I had already seen some sun bears, so that kind of balanced it out. We also saw a wild west show, which was very violent (considering the audience was full of kids) but had some clever stunts and trained animals. It was a fun day, with heaps to do, but I couldn't help feeling a bit sad for the animals, particularly the ones that were essentially tame and being force fed carrots by silly tourists. I guess in the end, they are well cared for, and the park does a lot to help endangered animals and the environment, so it could be a lot worse. Plus, it was a lot cheaper than going somewhere similar, or a theme park, in Australia, even if you did have to keep putting your hand in your pocket for every little thing!

Anyway, that's enough of my western middle-class values getting in the way! I'll end with something a lot lighter - here is Ralphie with an elephant :-)