Off To The Zoo With Kids In Tow

This weekend we were lucky(?) enough to look after our niece and nephew while their parents went galavanting up north to visit friends. Not wanting them to get too bored we had to come up with something for them to do, and so having established that they’d never been to a zoo before, we decided to head down to Port Lympne Animal Park, part of the Aspinall Foundation, to go and see some animals.

First thing we did when we arrived was to have a picnic lunch in the park, in the hope that it would build up their excitement knowing that they were close to seeing animals that they’d only seen on TV and in books before.

When we’d finished, and I’d run back to the car to drop the coolbox back, we took the primate trail and first animals that we got to see close up was a troop of baboons, complete with a few small baby ones. In this section there were lemurs and pigmy marmosets and various other monkeys. There is a large gorilla enclosure here and while we spent a bit of time just watching them lay around doing nothing, just as we were preparing to leave one of the keepers appeared to feed them. All of the gorillas headed outside to pick up the food that was being scattered all around the outside area, and the kids enjoyed watching them foraging for their food and clambering over their play house trying to find all that they could.

After the primate section came the big cats, and this was actually a bit disappointing. I seem to remember there being a few more than the one tiger and two lions the last time I came here and so there wasn’t really much to see here. In fact the kids seemed to have much more fun playing on the climbing frame and slides that were opposite those enclosures!

As the kids were getting tired we jumped on the safari truck to take us back to basecamp so that we could board another truck to take us on the Safari Experience. Those two words conjure up quite an image, however the reality is a lot less exciting. We saw some deer and wildebeest in the distance, got close to a few more deer, saw a giraffe (in the distance) and then some more deer.

If you were sat on the right side of the truck (as we were) you really don’t get to see much of the distant animals! It felt like this was just a means to get you to another shop/cafe and children’s play area, not really an animal sight-seeing tour.

So after our stop off, we headed back to basecamp and then trundled back to the car for the journey home. At least we had managed to tire the kids out so the journey home was quiet!