San Diego Zoo Safari Park

Northern White Rhino

We arrived at the San Diego Zoo Safari park at about 10 AM in the morning and managed to spend almost the entire day here. Of course, at everyone’s recommendation we took the African safari tram ride – it proved a lot easier to find animals here than in Africa. What we saw in much more abundance here than in the wild were rhinoceros. The park is particularly known for having success breeding rhinos as well as some other difficult to breed animals with the eventual goal of returning them to the wild in many cases. For rhinos the trick was to have lots of females, who need to be in small herds, called a crash, to breed successfully. But for the Northern White Rhino the end is near, only eight individuals exist in the world, one of which is here.

Asian Rhino

            We also spent a little more money to do a cart tour of the Asian animals. This proved well worth it, since we saw a lot of animals we had never seen before. For example, the Asian Rhino which has panels of skin on its backside, the only true wild horse remaining from Mongolia as well as camels from there. Then these beautiful white oryx from Saudi Arabia which are endangered, but still hunted there. These could well have led to the legends about unicorns.

            After our tour, the zoo staff was showing off a serval and caracal. This cat with tufted ears was beautiful and did some interesting leaps into the air to show how he might attack his prey. We walked through lagoon areas with lots of birds, toward the gorilla’s where we were introduced to a young one being closely watched by its mother. By now it was about 3PM and Mary was tired, but we wanted to see the tigers. Well it was a long walk, up and down hills, and in the end we didn’t see a single tiger. A disappointing ending to a great day.

            We drove about 50 miles outside San Diego to Lake Morena RV Park, a county park at about 3500 feet in altitude. What a nice secluded (there isn’t even a radio signal) park near a reservoir.