travelling day fourteen - pandas to the left, flamingos to the right

Our excursion today was to the Wuhan Zoo.  Specifically to see a panda.  It was a quite different experience to Australia Zoo, with hawkers at the front gate and concrete caged enclosures for most of the animals.  But there was quite a variety of animals - tigers, pandas, flamingos, jabirus, bears, elephants, monkeys, lions, peacocks, rhinos and swans.

pandas.  in China.

Annika was particularly upset by the young men who had stripped down a long piece of bamboo, and were poking it through the bars to stir up the sleeping lions.  They were roaring and swatting at the stick, being quite ferocious.  Hence the origin of the phrase 'don't wake a sleeping lion, particularly with a long stick'.  Gabby decided she needed to report them to the zoo keeper - but we did not see one.

Our time in Wuhan has come to a close and we leave on the train to Beijing tonight.  It has been a great growing time and amazing to see some of the work here.  We have had an introduction to living in China that we would not have had if we had been tourists.  No-one has been sick yet, and the children are only slightly crabby sometimes!

There will be a break in regular blog programming when we are in Beijing due to the limited computer access.

Hopefully I will write more from Vietnam!