This Trip Will Help You Re-Live Your Childhood
As kids, we spend a lot of time in school: learning new things, playing games, discovering who we might become. Class trips embraced all of those elements perfectly. The simple act of changing the scenery offered us a vital sense of adventure. As we lock ourselves down to homes, jobs, and screens, who among us doesn’t wander back to those curious days of childhood? And who couldn’t use a change of scenery?
The zoo is a classic school trip because it truly has everything: education, nature, movement, excitement, and play. Who says you need to be a kid to experience all that?
With hundreds of animals, plants, and habitats to explore, a day trip to either the San Diego Zoo or Safari Park (or both) makes for the perfect summer reset. After the longest closure in the organization’s history, the San Diego Zoo and Safari Park are now open, and thrilled to welcome visitors back — with new safety precautions and many adorable baby animals that won’t be babies for long. Call it a mini vacation or a trip down memory lane — you probably need both. Here are five reasons to plan your day in the wild.
1. Play outdoors — while actually social distancing
The older we get, the more we have to fight for our time outside. Unlike public beaches and parks, the San Diego Zoo and Safari Park are able to reduce the number of guests on grounds to less than half of the usual capacity and enforce mask requirements. Their limited guest policy allows you to plan for a day outdoors without the uncertainty of an uncontrolled environment. In addition to extra and more frequent cleaning and disinfecting, the parks have added hand sanitizing stations and guided modifications for guest movement, including signs, some one-way direction routes, and ground spacing markers. Before you visit, check out this handy guide, detailing the Zoo and Safari Park’s most popular visiting hours and their current estimated wait times. Bonus: Fewer crowds also means more time watching your favorite animals.
2. Hang out on a beach — with penguins
No, seriously: A beach day with penguins. The Penguin & Friends tour at the Zoo includes a great view of the African penguin colony with special private viewing of their spacious, cobblestone beach, and nesting area. They even have rock work that mimics the granite boulders found at Boulders Beach in South Africa, along with a 200,000-gallon pool with depths up to 13 feet, with a spot for underwater viewing. And you should want to meet them: African penguins have declined by 60% in the last 28 years, making these little birds one of the most endangered types of penguin. On your tour, you’ll learn how the San Diego Zoo is working to conserve them in the wild (and maybe catch one diving off the rocks)!
3. Make new friends — baby animal friends
Akobi, the four-month-old pygmy hippo calf, isn’t just special because he’s an adorable swimming baby. There are fewer than 2,500 pygmy hippos left in the world, most of them residents of West Africa’s rivers and forests. Agapito, an Andean bear cub who was born to his mother, Alba, in January, is also part of an endangered species. In fact, first-month mortality rates of Andean bear cubs run so high that Agapito is like a little miracle. Similarly astounding are the two Amur leopard cubs born in late April in the African Rocks Habitat. Once found in northeastern China, Russia, and Korea, Amur leopards are one of the most endangered species on the planet, with fewer than 100 total left in their native habitat. Finally, the Zoo embraced new, twin ring-tailed lemurs — Meva, a female, and her brother, Tsiky. Unlike other primates, ring-tailed lemurs lack many of the facial muscles used to communicate with facial expressions, and so they use their tails to talk instead.
4. Embark on a Wildlife Safari tour
If you’re really looking to awaken that sense of childlike wonder, the Safari Park offers a number of different wildlife tours, allowing you to see all the animals up close while keeping distant from others in a private, open-air safari truck. You might see the new cheetah cub that Safari Park Animal Care Staff are raising, or the newborn “porcupettes,” also known as porcupine pups. Other baby animals include Zahara, a female giraffe calf whose name was chosen by the public through an online poll (democracy!), or a little zebra foal who doesn’t have a name yet. Finally, the most “ancient” of the bunch: two, greater one-horned rhinos, one of whom is called Arjun. Though just born, these rhinos represent an ancient lineage — their ancestors walked the Earth 55 million years ago! — and today, only five species continue the line.
5. Learn something new — and not from a screen
Depending on how long ago you were a kid, you might recall pre-smartphone days with relief. Exploring nature reminds us that despite the craziness of modern life, the world outside keeps turning. If you’ve spent much of quarantine watching nature documentaries to get your outdoor fix (or circled the block of your neighborhood enough to memorize every blade of grass), it’s a good time to be reminded that we’d be nothing without the rhythms of plants and animals. Visits to the San Diego Zoo and Safari Park are the perfect antidotes to a tough year, and the way back to this extraordinary planet we call home.
Images: Molly Kugelmann/ Bustle
This article is sponsored by the San Diego Zoo and Safari Park. The Zoo and Safari Park are open every day, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays, and 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. (Hours are subject to change, so check the websites sandiegozoo.org and sdzsafaripark.org for the most up-to-date information.)
