Saturday, August 16, 2008

Growl! A roaring trip to the Feline Park (Parc de Felins)






Well, after the rather disappointing trip to the zoo the day before (plus Bibou commented that she didn’t get to feed the animals, which was true of course, since you can’t feed the animals at the zoo), I went on a manic hunt for a good place to visit where you can also feed the animals. So I went onto the MESSAGE website to do a search, and chance upon an old post about the Parc de felins and it sounded really interesting. Plus it was posted by a good friend of ours, Ami, so I called her up to ask about it. Happy chance it was, she too was cranking her head for a good place to visit too with her 3 kids. And it had been a good few years for them since they’d been, and definitely not at this new ‘venue’ (the park has moved). So we quickly made plans, I went off to make a big picnic for us (some pasta, carrot, ham and cheese salad) and we stopped at the bakery to buy some baguettes and pate. It was a good 45 minutes drive and the kids fell asleep for a little nap, which was great as they needed it! We arrived just about the same time as Ami and her three kids arrived. What great timing! Yah. We woke the kids up and set up for the picnic. The 4 kids were just great together; Theo and Loic were quite ‘grown’ up, and did a wonderful job of keeping an eye out for the younger ones, especially Angel. They were just so sweet with her, playing with her, walking with her, holding hands, talking to her etc! I was just so impressed by them. Bibou and her ‘good friend’ Isabelle were just inseparable all day! I loved it when were said that we wanted to take a photo for them together, they’d immediately, without any prompting, put their hands across the other’s shoulders. You KNOW they’ve done this before!! Anyway, after the picnic and pee-pee breaks, we all were ready for our walk! The park is not like a zoo, where you walk past exhibits. The park actually covers an area of about 60 hectares and has different paths with ‘enclosures’. And there are no other animals except cats…different types of cats. It’s actually a breeding center for cats that are close to extinction. The enclosures are closely built to the environmental conditions for each ‘type’ of cat. It’s really like a looooong walk in the woods where you stop and see the animals! There were different ‘paths’ – European, America, Asian and African. We covered all but the America ones as by then, we’d walked like about 3- 4 hours! There were just so many stunningly beautiful and elegant cats, such as the leopards, panthers, lions, tigers, cheetahs, lynxes etc. There was even a white tiger! Unfortunately, most of them were sleeping though, as it was ‘siesta’ time. We did chance upon the enclosure of tigers where the two tigers were pacing. That was intense! After the three circuits, we stopped by a little ‘info booth’ where the kids asked a couple of questions. We found out that for the big(ger) cats, they were thrown freshly dead whole carcass of meat! Sometimes, they were also given whole live chickens and other similar animals so that they were on the ‘hunt’.

After that, the kids were all excited ‘coz it was time to go feed the goats! We
’d bought a bag of popcorn (sold at the entrance!) so the kids could feed them. Unfortunately, those goats are really really pushy! They really charge at the kids, and poor Bibou got so scared that she tried to run away and tripped and fell! Ai. That didn’t go down well! But after some comfort, she wanted to go in again, though she was very cautious! She did enjoy feeding and petting the goats in the end, and so did Angel too!

All in all, a really enjoyable, educational and fun day. And tiring too, the kids were all fast asleep as soon as we got in!






























Some movies that we'd taken :

























Here's Angel watching the tiger with Theo helping her along.


























Angel's first time touching a goat!
































The girls with the goats!






Finally, just prior to returning, Bibou wasn't too afraid of feeding the goats.

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