Peter and I went to Port Lympne on Wednesday. I guess it was one of the spontaneous decisions, having been there before myself I told Pete all about it, and he seemed pretty amazed by the fact that you can go on a safari a kind of a real one… African Experience it’s called…
I do not support captivity ideas at all, I find them cruel and freedom-depriving, Port Lympne however is not a typical zoo, it’s a Park that has unbelievably lots of space and really has got this nice feeling to it. What I absolutely love about that place is of course, that endangered species of animals are bred there and released into their natural habitats. Even though I am always quite sceptical about this due to lives led differently in captivity and wilderness (such as people feeding animals, choosing mating partners, providing medical care etc., these you see are unavailable to the animals in the wilderness), stunningly staff at Port Lympne have successfully put animals back in the wild (animals are monitored and there is evidence they are mixing well with the indigenous inhabitants of their land, which is great). Every single species that visitors can observe has a note displayed somewhere outside their occupied area that informs of what numbers are left in the wild or if they’re extinct in the wild and all sorts of other information. It’s so good that Port Lympne spreads the awareness of dangers and ecological issues.
There is one more thing that I definitely need to mention, namely the gorillas. There was this metal box on the wall and had three holes on the top. I have no clue what the box contained, it could have been probably either water or some kind of a liquid food. Anyway, what happens is the gorillas want to get this something out of the box, but obviously they find it quite difficult to do this. Well, read carefully, we actually saw a gorilla pick up a stick, put it through the hole in the box, take it out with the food on the other end and consume it!!! I have never seen primates use tools in reality. I’ve only seen a few documentaries where chimps were using rocks to crack nuts open. I was absolutely stunned…

Yup, we had a great time!

xx