Dalian Forest Zoo: Should We Call the WWF?

I have made it back unscathed from another shopping trip into Manjitan (the small village which is a ten minute walk from campus). This may sound easy, but it is no ordinary feat, considering that you have to cross a rather busy rotary to get there and back! If you don't understand why this would be a problem, please refer to the list of Chinese Road Rules in the previous post...

I quite enjoy having the village so close by. I am able to walk there, get all of my shopping done, and walk back - all in an hour! That's not the most exciting part, however. I'm quite pleased to announce that today I bought enough vegetables to last us the rest of the week for less than $2. I picked up onions, garlic, ginger, carrots, snow peas, mushrooms, cabbage, and potatoes all for that low, low price. I also splurged on six bananas for 70 cents.

However, my wonderful shopping trip is not really what I'm here to blog about today. As some of you may know, my birthday was on Saturday and, as a birthday treat, Daniel decided that he would take me to the Dalian Forest Zoo. We mapped out the shortest route the night before, which meant going to the second-last Chingway stop and taking a taxi from there. I learned how to tell the taxi where we wanted to go in Chinese, but it would seem that was not enough to convince him that were were not tourists. He proceeded to take us the most convoluted route possible around town until Daniel and I began talking amongst ourselves and muttering "It's too expensive" in Chinese. Our route suddenly got mysteriously more direct!

Upon arriving at the zoo, we were surprised to see that the admission price was almost as high as that of the Toronto Zoo. I suppose tourist traps are the same outlandish prices across the globe. The first exhibit we came across was the children's area containing a petting zoo. We wandered around to see the most unusual mix of animals ever spotted at a zoo - chicks dyed a variety of colors, ducks, guinea pigs, "fragrant pigs", zebras, llamas, horses, bunnies, and even dogs (who were very happy with all of the Chinese tourists feeding them sausage!).

We were quite amused after wandering through this odd petting zoo, taking pictures in the tropical flower house, watching people on elephant rides, and having a nice lunch of dumplings and soup at the cafeteria. It only got better from there - for a while, anyways...

We next found ourselves in the "free raising area". Upon seeing the signs, we were a bit worried about what we might be about to encounter. Would there be dangerous animals roaming free?? Not quite, but mighty close! There were zebras, giraffes, emu, and other various vegetarian critters all wandering about in their enclosures that were nothing more than a small wooden fence.

We continued on to the next section of the free raising area and were alarmed to see, as we walked down the stairs, two llamas, actually wandering about freely. We soon saw that they were not alone. There were more llamas, goats, dear, and other various creatures all wandering about amongst the tourists! At this point, we decided is was definitely worth the money and may just be one of the coolest zoos we'd ever seen!

Even once we had gotten out of the free roaming portion of the zoo, we were still very impressed. All of the carnivorous animals were enclosed but had a raised platform for viewing, ideal for taking pictures!

We made it trough the first half of the zoo, rather tired from the excessive amount of walking. Using Chinese, we asked directions to the cable car that would take us to the other section of the zoo which, according to the map we had, appeared to be on part way up the mountain.

For those of you who have never been on a cable car, I would describe this one as a distinct feeling of risking your life. It began with boarding the car - a process by which you jump in off of a platform while the car is still moving along. By the time we were half way up the mountain, listening the the creaking and groaning of the cables, and realizing that we were almost the only people riding said cable car, we began to question our decision. We were relieved when we we saw the top of the mountain (although a little nervous about whether disembarking would be as challenging as boarding). We reached the summit and breathed a sigh of relief until we suddenly realized that the ride was not yet over. The other half of the zoo was on the other SIDE of the mountain. It was at this point when we noted that the attachment holding our cars onto the cables did not, in fact, wrap around the wire. They merely say on top, with a six inch gap at the bottom.

We descended the peak as Daniel held onto the handle with white knuckles and I snapped pictures furiously. I suppose I figured if I was going to die, I may as well have documentation of the journey!

One might wonder why riding a cable car would be any scarier than riding, let's say, a roller coaster... You see with a roller coaster, the ride is over in minutes -if it's a particularly long one. Our grueling ride on the cable car, which turned out to be at least 2km long, took us almost 20 minutes.

We reached the other side safely, even after having to jump from the moving car (I felt like I should tuck and roll). We soon began to realize, however, that we had found our way to the extremely "sketchy" side of the zoo...

The contrast was...well...disturbing. The nice side had zoo workers everywhere, feeding the animals and cleaning; the sketchy side had not a single employee in sight. The nice side was full of tourists; sketch side was nearly abandoned. Nice side had cheery music playing everywhere; sketchy side was eerily quiet. Nice side was beautifully maintained with landscaping, sculptures, and even a waterfall; sketchy side was in a shambles. Nice side had happy animals frolicking about; sketchy side had sad looking animals in small, ill maintained enclosures, looking like they hadn't seen a happy day in recent memory. Even the weather got worse when we crossed to "the other side".

My theory as to why there was such a vast difference in the two side is that the nice side was right down by the Dalian tourist strip whereas the not-so-nice side backed on to Dalian's residential area. Whatever the reason, I almost wish we'd never found the cable car.

I won't talk much about what we saw there, as it was much too disturbing to dwell on. A few of the images that stick out for me are the parrot who had plucked himself nearly clean of feathers due to stress, the panda looking very dejected and turning his back to passers-by, and last - and most definitely worse - the monkey enclosure...

The monkey enclosure was probably the most disturbing thing I had ever seen. It was clear that several of the monkeys had the same bug as they sat one by one coughing and hacking. One monkey laid strewn out in another's arms - I was happy to see him move, as I though it might in fact be dead. One monkey was so thirsty that he was licking the water running down the wall.

I decided not to take pictures of any of the things I found disturbing, as I did not want them to be lasting memories...

The one plus side to visiting the sketchy side of the zoo is that, due to it's relative abandonment, there were several strange insects roaming about that I may never have seen otherwise. I got a fairly close shot of a cicada (which are usually hard to spot), a praying mantis was kind enough to pose for me, and I found a bug that looked like a walking pile of sticks (apparently a type of math larvae) which I was only able to identify by e-mailing an entomologist!

After some searching, we finally found the way out, which ended up being a .5 k trek before reaching the road. We taxied home, ordered an outlandishly expensive pizza for supper, and fell asleep partially happy with our visit to the awesome zoo, and partially scarred for life by it's "evil" side.