Ubon Ratchathani Zoo

Today I woke up to find the wifi was working again! It had mysteriously stopped working the night before. It didn’t interrupt anything important like Netflix, just talking to my Dad.

For breakfast we had an endless supply of pancakes for breakfast – it was wonderful! I also had them with grapes and I can confirm that grapes and pancakes are a good combination. Maprang asked afterwards if we usually eat fruit with pancakes and what we like having for breakfast. Surprisingly we came to the decision that we liked toast and pancakes for breakfast. We also suggested that rice for breakfast was a little too strange for us. Hopefully she wasn’t too offended, but I’ll see what happens this week.

While Maprang took Sarah and one of the Husky dogs to the vets (they needed to have tic treatments) we got a taxi to the zoo that afternoon. And yes, Aum did call the taxi for us. The zoo we went to was a safari zoo and you could either take the bus round or drive a golf kart around by yourself. We chose the golf cart.

We put Kate down as the lead driver but all took turns. It made a change to walking around the zoo. Me and Hannah first sat in the back of the kart and found that you had to hold onto the kart when it was driven, despite it looking sturdy. After being directed in the right direction we began our tour of the zoo.

We first went through a deer enclosure. There was nothing between us and them. We had to stay on the kart but we slowed down to take photos of the deer.

Then we came to the lion enclosure. This we did not drive through, however, thankfully there was a large moat between us and the lions.

The next animals we saw were the tigers. When we parked the kart up the zoo keepers put a snack together for the tigers in a buoy and threw it in the moat for the tigers to get. It made for some awesome photos.

By this point it was my turn to drive (everyone else had driven it already). Considering I have never driven anything since a dodgem at Cardiff Winter Wonderland at Christmas, I was a little terrified. We also had to let a bus pass us because I couldn’t figure out why the kart wouldn’t start! No, it wasn’t because the key wasn’t turned. There was a little switch by my right leg that I had completely forgotten about and had been switched to neutral.

After we let the bus pass us we went to the next enclosure. This one had giraffes, zebras and ostriches. Yes the zebras are as great as they look in the photos!

Only an hour had passed by and we had rented the kart for two hours so we went around again and got some even better photos of animals as we were behind a bus for most of the way around. At the white tiger enclosure the people on the bus got sticks and put meat on the end to poke through the cages to feed the tigers. I didn’t do it, but it got the tigers close enough to photograph them.

In the other tiger enclosure the zoo keepers put the meat on a line that the tigers had to climb up rocks to get to.

In the giraffe enclosure, because we were by ourselves the zoo keepers there gave us some branches to feed the giraffes with. You had to hold onto the branches with two hands because they pulled so strongly!

We then got a taxi to Central Plaza (again, I know) for lunch. We decided to go for a KFC instead of pizza. When Kate and Eilidh went for ice cream upstairs, me and Hannah walked and looked around the plaza. We both ended up buying a tshirt, mines plain green but Hannah’s has a picture of the forest on it with great slogans such as ‘there is no wifi in the forest but you will find a better connection’ and ‘may the forest be with you’ amongst others.