San Diego, day 4: San Diego Safari Park

[amethyst73]

You should be able to see all of today's pictures here.

Before diving in, let me just say that the Safari Park kind of gives you a safari before you ever reach the park.  It's way the heck out somewhere between the Escondido wine country and nowhere, and it could stand another sign or two along the way just to reassure you that you're really headed the right way.  Also, when visiting Africa Escondido, we found that it is hot.  Hot hot hot.  And, the Park people being careful to mimic the plant density patterns found in Africa, meant that sometimes there just wasn't a lot of shade.  I was very glad for my hat!

The San Diego Safari Park is a zoo, but it's a zoo with a very different feel than the San Diego Zoo.  Where the Zoo is lots of animals in quite close proximity, the Safari Park is lots of animals rather more distant from each other.  Part of this is due to what I'll call the central attraction, for lack of a better term: the huge African environment where rhinos, giraffes, and other large mammals roam freely.  But the other exhibits (and there are several) are more spaced out than the Zoo ones, and there's a fair amount of walking involved to get from point A to point B.

I was somewhat disappointed by the Park's main attraction, but that was primarily due to anticipation.  I'd heard that when you went out into the savannah, the animals were right there and you could practically reach out and touch them.

Well.  It turned out you could do that, but only if you were willing to pay close to $100 above the already somewhat steep ($44 without discounts or combos) admission price.  What you did get with your admission price was unlimited rides on the Africa Tram, a tram that went around the big Africa enclosure.  And to be fair, the ride was still pretty impressive. The guide talked a lot about the adaptations of the different animals, and we got to see giraffes and rhinos (including a baby) moderately close up and in a habitat designed to make them feel "natural."  (One of the Safari Park's primary missions is to help save endangered species through breeding programs, and most of the point of the huge Africa part is to encourage the animals to breed.  It seems to be working.)  It was more than a little irritating to feel like, if we wanted to see the really amazing stuff (of which there were several options), we were asked to pony up quite a bit of extra cash.

Fortunately, there were plenty of other really neat things to see:

- the Lemur Walk, in which I got within a few feet of a bunch of lemurs napping in a tree, and where we later saw some more awake lemurs walking right up to a little girl on the path.

- the aviary in the Lost Forest, which reminded us a lot of the Hummingbird Garden at the Zoo.  In this case, the aviary was two or three separate rooms, each of which held lots of birds who were not particularly frightened of us.  We didn't get a lot of pictures, but we did get a couple of impressive ones.  And we practically got buzzed by one of the larger birds carrying sticks and leaves back and forth for its nest!

- the elephant enclosure, which was one of the last things we saw.  There were elephants of several ages, including one quite young one.  The elephants actually approached us instead of heading to the opposite end of the enclosure, and were perfectly happy to mug for the camera.

- the cheetah run, where the resident cheetah has a special 100-meter track that she gets to run down every day at 3:30.  A plush toy is attached to a string, and the first time the cheetah's best buddy, a big white Alsatian Shepherd dog, chased it down the track to reassure the cheetah that everything was okay.  Then the cheetah went - and when it went, it _really_ went.  It's just astonishing how fast it got going within just a few bounds.  I tried to take videos of it during the two runs, but neither came out well.  I did get some shots of the cheetah getting its well-earned dinner (and petting) at the end of the run.

Comments

[onyoukai.livejournal.com]

Trivia about the "Safari Park":

Most San Diegans seem to hate the name. I still think of it by its old name, the "Wild Animal Park", and most locals I encounter also continue to use the old name. The "Safari Park" name is very recent (only about 3 years ago), and when the announcement about this name change came out, there was a lot of negative community backlash.

The name change was for marketing purposes, citing claims that people were searching for "safari parks" in Google and this was how tourists were finding out about the Wild Animal Park. While the website analytics data may be true, the name is still a misnomer because, as you've now seen, the "safari" experience is NOT what most park patrons get. This was one of the reasons locals were pissed off: it was an obvious marketing ploy to get people to buy in to really expensive extra packages and create the expectation that patrons would be getting something that most won't even get. (The Wild Animal Park's visitor attendance had been falling, and the park also suffered some damage during the last round of wildfires throughout San Diego County. I haven't looked up the data to know whether changing the name to Safari Park helped visitor numbers like they claimed it would.) A more accurate name is "Hike everywhere, get sunburns, and see animals from really far away" Park.

Summer is the worst time to visit the Wild Animal Park. Yes, Escondido is hot, and the San Pasqual area is especially awful. The weather has actually been a little cooler over the past week, but we're still not out of summer yet. This and the lack of shade is one reason why I had a lot of trouble enjoying the park. It was fine if it wasn't summer and I was in a shady area. To be fair, I haven't been to the park in forever, not since before the huge remodeling that happened even before the name change.

If you thought there was a lot of walking now, my mom (who has visited the park several times in the last few years) told me that the remodeling actually reduced the amount of walking that patrons had to do before. Also, the remodeling fixed the fact that many of the exhibits had a horrible layout where you were LUCKY if you ever got to see the animals inside. The big cats (the animals I wanted to see most) tended to be the worst in that respect, and on top of that most of them were so far out there that you'd spend most of your day hiking out to their enclosures (and then usually see nothing). I was told that many of the cats were moved to more accessible areas and their enclosures redesigned.

Their elephants have always been very social. I'm assuming the park still does it, but they used to do elephant shows a couple times a day, and afterwards the patrons could go to a meeting area for free, give the elephants treats, and pet their trunks.

They used to do special dinosaur exhibits every so often with animatronic dinosaurs. Some of them were epically gory.

[amethyst73.livejournal.com]

Ooo, I like your name for the park. It's fairly accurate!

One of the things I noticed in connection with "damn this place is HUGE" is that, unlike the Zoo, there's NO transit from point A to point B besides your feet. The Zoo at least has both the express bus and the Sky-thingy. They don't cover all the bases, admittedly, but they at least give you an option besides walking - and they're free with admission.

We didn't quite make it out to the tigers; that area is currently under construction anyway. The lions are in a pretty good spot; one lioness was napping right next to a window (okay, there was a shade-shelter between most of her and the window, so you couldn't see all of her) and the other put on a pretty decent show for us.

There is an elephant show, but we didn't catch it, so no idea if they let you pet the elephants. (Unlike with the cheetah, there is no Elephant Safari listed, so if they still let the elephants hang with the public, it's an activity that comes with regular admission.)

It really is a sort of strange place. They've provided lots of activities for the little people (splash pool, playground, carousel), and the Really Expensive Safari for Grownups With Way Too Much Money On Their Hands, and... yeah, not quite so much for those of us in between. You kind of have to be okay with the fact that your day is going to be not so full of stuff as you originally thought.

[onyoukai.livejournal.com]

The Wild Animal Park is pretty much just a conservation and animal-breeding facility that they let outsiders walk around in. It's never really been tailored a whole lot to human visitors, because the primary mission is protecting and restoring endangered species. Coincidentally, while my mom and I were driving up the 15 to Sears in Escondido this evening, she actually started ranting about the "Safari Park" name and how she'll always call it the Wild Animal Park because there are no safaris.

I'm sure the reason they've added more stuff for kids is that, quite frankly, kids are MISERABLE going there otherwise. I can tell you, subjecting them to perpetually hot weather, no shade, the frustration of not seeing the animals you want to see, and lots of walking over huge areas for small bodies makes for some REALLY cranky, resentful, and angry children who have trouble giving a shit about anything other than how miserable they are. They need other things to distract them from the walking and the hot sun, and one can only giggle at the deer called "dikdik" so many times.

But yeah, otherwise you have to like walking and hiking to enjoy yourself there, because it basically is just a bunch of hiking trails, except you can see animals too. That's how my mom and my sister get exercise. They don't go for walks around the block, they go to the Wild Animal Park.

I don't know if it still exists, but there used to be an amphitheater with a really big lawn and picnic tables. It was the shadiest part of the entire park, and every so often they'd have music concerts there, like bluegrass summer festivals and stuff.

I might be interested in going back someday during the winter when the weather is better, because the cat exhibits have been radically redone since I last went. The lions literally used to be in one of the farthest corners of the park, and their enclosure was filled with REALLY high grasses and trees. The pedestrian path only approached one corner of the enclosure, far away from the trees (which is where the lions were always hanging out, out of sight), and the monorail went directly over the enclosure and you saw more of the defensive wall than anything else. But now, they've brought them to a more accessible place and redesigned it so that the visitors are able to view it at the area the lions actually hang out in. So, I think over the years they have considered visitor feedback, because that remodeling they did addressed a lot of common complaints about the location and design of the animal exhibits.

[amethyst73.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you're right about the little kids! (They are probably also the reason behind the $15 "balloon safari," where you go 400 feet up in a hot air balloon and get an incredible view.. for, like 5 minutes.)

It's probably worth going to, once, since you haven't seen it in so long. Having seen the park (even though there was some neat stuff), I don't feel a need to go back anytime terribly soon.

[onyoukai.livejournal.com]

Exactly. If it hadn't been totally remodeled, I wouldn't be interested. But even then, I'll wait until someone with a pass has a free guest or half-off admission coupon, because the full price just isn't worth it.