Wanderung 30

(Bob) Today we first rode to nearest food store to buy food for the day. On the way we saw a field of wild rosebushes, and a little 5 Krone stand, where Monika found a beautiful belt. Once we were assured that food was within bicycling distance, we tried to sign up for another night, but no luck. Then we rushed over to catch the 10:25 ferry to Asko, but it never came! Turning to Plan B, we rode back through Bandholm and around the perimeter of the Knuthenborg Safari Park to its entrance out in the middle of nowhere. Entrance was about $80 for both of us, but in the end we spent around 6 hours there and had a grand time.

Bicycles are not allowed in the carnivore habitats like tigers and wolves, nor in with the big herbivores that can be quite dangerous like rhinoceri, buffaloes, and yaks, so we had to take some woodland paths that skirted those areas. But even riding amongst the herds of non-aggressive herbivores on a bicycle made me feel quite vulnerable as the bike offers zero protection.

The first skirting path came out in a monkey enclosure that featured baboons, so we watched their antics for a bit. Then we went into a lemur enclosure and serendipitously met a ranger feeding them pieces of apple, which they like as apples are sweet, and pieces of carrots, which they tend to eschew despite their nutritional advantage. Kids!

To get into the tiger enclosure you had to drive through a dual door safety gate. Although we were not allowed to ride our bicycles through the Siberian tiger enclosure, due to the distinct possibility of becoming "meals on wheels", we could watch the tigers being fed a tasty snack of raw meat from behind the safety of a glass walled feeding enclosure. Those are BIG ferocious looking cats with big teeth and they knew when and where the snack would be coming from!

Zig-zagging through the park in the general diection of the Arctic Wolves, we stopped off at the Australian animal section, emus and wallabies. One of the wallabies had a Joe peeking out of its pouch and when we left the enclosure, we noticed, the emus seemed mightily interested in our bikes which we had left outside their enclosure. We also looked at the bird cages. It was cold and rainy at that point, however, and the mostly equatorial parakeets, parrots and mynah birds were sensibly huddled near the heat lamps at the inner corner of their enclosures.

The wolf feeding was interesting in that the wolf pack were far more cautious than I would have expected. Still the nine males and the alpha female did, after much preliminary sniffing, get down to the business of tearing the hindquarter of a deer to pieces.

We ended our day touring the remote corners of the quite large park, and we were both surprised that bactrian camels were that big, and that they appeared to be eating wooden tree trunks! It turned out that the camels were kind of chewing on the trees to help keep their teeth clean, rather like a dog chewing on a bone but on a much larger scale!

Exitting at the Bandholm city side of the park, we had a very short ride back to our hotel, which was a good thing as we had already put on 34 kilometers that day and were getting tired!