dia do trabalho

The first of May is a holiday here in Brazil- it’s their Labor Day, essentially. So with Brett off of work, we took the morning slowly and ate breakfast on the balcony (I did, at least). Then we left for the zoo around noon. The ‘zoologico’ was apparently a very popular place to be on a midweek holiday.

There was a line of cars to get in that stretched well onto the highway. We pulled over on the side of the road to take our place in line. Getting in was the most time consuming part. There were people that were selling their wares along the side of the road (cotton candy, snacks, water bottles, hats, and flags) so it made for some interesting people-watching.

When we finally got to the front gate and paid (R$ 2 each!!) we drove through to find a parking spot. The interesting part about this zoo was that after you got inside, it was basically a big open park. You drove along streets and parked on the side and then got out and walked around. Plenty of families had set up blankets and hammocks and were just camping out for the day. If I had known you could bring in your own food, that’s what we would have done!

We first walked around and found some parrots. They had a lot of parrots! I noticed throughout the day that they often had more of an animal if it was native to South America. Makes sense. Also makes for an interesting zoo experience for North Americans! We don’t get to see a lot of these animals. Oh- they had two blue parrots in a cage, much like the birds in the movie ‘Rio’. We thought that was funny.

the remains of an old aviary 

the bird from rio

Next, we walked down to a lake-type exhibit with islands that housed all sorts of ‘macas’ (monkeys) and capybaras. Capybaras look like really big muskrats/rabbits, but then you see one get in the water and submerge itself completely and it really throws you! I’m also pretty sure that I read somewhere that capybaras are the closest living relative to the elephant. They can swim really well and were on each of the islands.

Marcel from Friends

After the lake monkeys we walked over to some smaller cages that had some more, smaller monkeys. Not very much action here, I think they were all nocturnal. Next we saw the giant anteater. They had a lot of these because- surprise- they’re native to the Amazon/South America in general. Unfortunately they were sleeping also.

'The animals cannot eat popcorn'

We saw the one rhino (you can get pretty close to the animals, it was surprising) and then decided to find a place for lunch. Once we did, we got in line. We had planned on ordering the ‘prato do dia’ which seemed to consist of rice, beans, beef, and a salad. It looked pretty good for R$ 15! Unfortunately, they ran out of it two people ahead of us. That put a kink in our plans to simply say “Dois prato do dia, por favor”. Instead we ordered bread with cheese in it, which is like Brazil’s favorite food. They even have a chain restaurant called “Casa do Pao de Queijo”.

There was a very lucrative popcorn scene at this zoo, so we each got a bag after lunch (because a piece of bread was not going to cut it). We wandered over to the big cat section. They had three jaguars! I think that’s more than I’ve ever seen at one zoo. Surprisingly, all of the cats were out and about. The tigers were sleeping, but still clearly visible. They had one lion, which was kind of sad.

They had two elephants and one of them was super close! The keeper was there doing something, so I think he was interested in that, but it made for some good pictures. I think I liked the elephant the best. Brett said that he liked the weird hawks that we saw near the parrots. After the elephants we walked by the two giraffes (they were far away). And past the one zebra and one wildebeest.

After that we decided to call it a day. The zoo itself looked like it had been built around the same time that the city was built (1950’s) and had not been updated since then. Or rather, they were trying to update it, but would start a project and run out of money.

All in all, I think that we had a pretty good time exploring the zoo here. The animals themselves seemed to be a lot more active than I expected on an 86-degree day.

Adeus!

closed :( 

oh no!

crisis averted.