Monkeying around

This Christmas I was a bit stuck trying to work out what to get Nick for Christmas. I wanted to get him something fun, and something that he would like, but also something that could be easily posted and that wasn’t going to cost me millions of pounds. In the end, he received a stocking full of tat – there were foodie treats, some Lego (that he loves and that is on proud display by the TV in our flat now) and also a voucher for breakfast with the orang-utans at Singapore Zoo.

            I’ll be honest, the zoo voucher was as much a present for myself as it was for him, but he was pretty excited about it too, so when we finally managed to book ourselves in this Saturday, we were both slightly childishly excited!

            Having slightly cheekily told the zoo that the booking was for a very important birthday celebrations, we were happily seated in the very best seats in the house when we were showed into the open-air restaurant this morning.

            The breakfast was amazing – a full buffet of pretty much anything you could possibly want to eat for breakfast, with pretty tasty coffee and loads of fruit juices. Once that was done, an announcement was made to say that if we wanted to, we could take the ten minutes before the monkeys arrived to go and see the elephants having a morning bath and banana snack. We were off like a shot – no one else seemed to want to risk missing a second of the orang-utans, but we were over with the elephants, marvelling at how amazing they are, and back in our seats well before the parade of the redheads began.           

            The grand arrival of the hungry orang-utans saw them clambering over ropes and walkways from their enclosure over to where we were seated – they knew it was breakfast time, and they wanted to eat asap!

            Once they had arrived, they received a breakfast of fruit tea, fruit, veggies, nuts and seeds, fed to them by three very caring keepers whilst we were talked through the family arrangement. There were oldies, babies, toddlers and all the ages in between. It was incredible to see not only how strong their little family was, but also how willing they were for humans to line up in front of them (close enough to touch, but with firm instructions not to) for their photo to be taken. It was amazing, and I would definitely go again!

            To get entry to the restaurant for our booking, we also had to pay for entry to the normal zoo too, and seeing as we were there so early in the morning (9am on a Saturday is a very foreign experience for Nick) we were just in time for breakfast at a number of enclosures! I really hope that the snake had already eaten before I met him, but you can never be sure. Nick was as brave as he could be, reaching out to touch the snake for a grand total of about a second before quickly ran to wash his hands and refused to look me in the eye for a while - all because I went in for a snake hug. Rude!

The very best of these was the polar bear, who was fed in the water section of his pen. To see a polar bear right up close, swimming through the water and devouring his breakfast along the way was just utterly incredible! We then moved on to see giraffes, lions, tigers, hippos and elephants before making our way out of the park to meet Liv and her friend Charlie at my new favoured, PS Café (that’s right, the place with that three tier chocolate brownie mountain!).