San Diego, day 2: A day at the San Diego Zoo

If you're ever in San Diego, plan to spend a day at the zoo.  (Unless you can't stand animals or something like that.  Then maybe you shouldn't go.  But even then, you should seriously consider it as a possibility.)

Where to start..?

The zoo is huge.  Unless you have infinite amounts of energy, there's just no way to see it all in one day.

But in a way, the large size of the zoo almost doesn't matter, because the quality of each section is so impressively high.  Everywhere we went, I was impressed by how the zoo had managed to combine sizable and appropriate habitats with good spots for the humans to watch the denizens.  For example, in most zoos that have gorillas, the gorillas have a good-sized enclosure that they tend to stay out in the middle of, far away from their gawping, noisy, upright cousins.  I'm not quite sure how the San Diego Zoo managed to design their gorilla space such that the gorillas wanted to nap _literally on the other side of the glass_ in one of the viewing platforms.  The human side of that viewing platform was fairly dark, and the glass was thick and went all the way up to the ceiling, so there was a lot of soundproofing and vision-proofing that went into it.  Also, the really large enclosures (gorillas, tiger, hippo, polar bear, etc) all had multiple viewing areas that, if the animal in question wasn't visible at one, they were likely to be quite visible at another, assuming that they were actually in the enclosure at the time.  The zoo's also obviously put as much thought and work into its plantings as it has into its fauna.  There are trees and bushes and ferns and stuff everywhere, much of it signed and all of it really nicely done.  If I lived here, I would get a zoo membership in a heartbeat.

We did not see the pandas 'cuz there was a line.  We didn't see many bears up close.  And there's two sections of the zoo we barely touched, but I kind of think we may see some of the animals we missed at the Safari Park on Friday.

You can see pictures that I took here (hopefully).

( Some highlights of our visit )