well, with so much time off verk and school of late we decided to go out and about as much as possible with the boys. it was rather fortunate, then, that James mentioned at this time that he wished to go once again to the "big zoo" as he could not remember what he saw there.
by "big zoo" he meant Johannesburg Zoo, a place he went to once for a Christmas party and did not quite behave as well as he could have, as we recall! nonetheless he promised to be a very, very good boy and so off we went last Saturday!
and, as it turned out, most of last Saturday! we were there for more or less six hours and still managed not to see everything the place had to offer. a bloody massive place, it is! still, the boys very much enjoyed all that they saw, and indeed James was an exceptionally well behaved young man!
of all the animals we did see it's rather difficult to say which one or ones James and William liked the most. William was positively fascinated with all of them, and James was not far off being described as such. James was, it has to be said, impressed with this hippo in particular, especially when it did an absolutely massive, rapid fire poo against the wall before submerging itself in the water!
William was rather taken with the hippo, or should i say hippos (if that's how one spells it), as when we got there one was already rather nicely submerged in the pool. and when i say that William was rather taken with the Hippos, he was busy trying to climb out of his pram, or at least pulling himself and the pram up, to get a better look!
something rather similar happened when we went to see the elephants!
William actually started giving quite a vocal protesting performance when we tried to move on from seeing the elephants! he was quite keen to try and pretend his arm was a trunk and made some (for a 16 month year old) rather convincing elephant noises as he did it!
back briefly to the world of hippo, and a few hours (!) after the first hippo we saw we found another one, a breed called, i am reliably led to believe "pygmy hippo". James was quite taken by this one, i think because he was able to get so close to it!
speaking of getting up close to the animals who live at the zoo, James was well impressed that a giraffe took some time out to bend over and say hello to him!
James doesn't particularly look well impressed in the above picture, certainly, but that's probably due to me asking him to turn around for a picture to be taken! he spent quite a lot of time watching the giraffe eating away close to him, hoping i think that he could get even closer!
now then, whereas the majority of animals at the zoo are in rather large looking enclosures, James and William found a rather curious large gorilla just wandering around! thankfully they decided to catch him!
and indeed they did more than catch him. i can't say i approve of William's approach here, trying to keep the escaped gorilla in line with a stick, but i dare say a great many readers of this site shall no doubt approve!
whereas at our usual place of choice for a day out, Lory Park, you can get rather close to the Lions, they are at Johannesburg Zoo a little bit further away. still, it's great to see them, especially when the (presumably) "alpha male" of the pack comes along to let you know he's watching you!
other than seeing all the animals (well, almost all - we somehow managed to miss the tigers), there was loads and loads of things for the boys to do whilst there. whereas James and William have an impressive jungle gym thing in the garden, it's not quite in the league of this one, which James chose to play on instead of eating lunch!
and there are some very class fairground like rides there, too! James wanted to go on every single one, but it was getting a little late by the time we got to them so he just had to be content with captaining this rather impressive looking space rocket train!
William isn't quite big enough to go on all these rides and jungle gyms with James just yet, but he is not far off. in the mean time, he seems perfectly happy to sit and watch as his big brother gets on with it!
needless to say, we had a wonderful, if somewhat exhausting, day! no doubt we shall try and do it all again rather soon, hopefully before the really cold weather sets in here!
be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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