My wife and I spent a nice week in San Diego in June of this year (Click HERE and HERE to see some photos from the trip) and and had a day to spare for some site seeing. I asked my wife where she’d like to visiting during our freed day, and the San Diego Wild Animal Park came up – she’d visited the San Diego zoo during her previous visit to San Diego, but didn’t make it to the Wild Animal Park. I’m always up for seeing cool animals, so I was happy to oblige.
I had both my 5D Mark II and my 7D with me, but the longest lens I brought with me was my 24-105 f4.0L as I hadn’t anticipated our trip to the Wild Animal Park. Still, I managed to get a few nice photos – be sure and click on the photos to see a larger, gallery view.
The San Diego Wild Animal Park is part of the San Diego zoo. I consistently see the San Diego zoo and the Wild Animal Park (which apparently has changed its name to the San Diego Safari Park in recent weeks) ranked in the top 10 zoos in the country, but I was more than a bit disappointed by our visit. I can’t help but use the Cincinnati Zoo back home as a benchmark, which I think provides a much better value ($25 plus tax per adult vs. $37.00 plus tax). We spent a couple of hours walking around and felt we hit all the major points of interests. I thought perhaps that the Wild Animal Park was just a smaller part of the San Diego Zoo proper, but Karen indicated she was none too impressed with the San Diego zoo when she visited. I think the think that really irritated me was that you couldn’t walk 10 feet without hitting another junkfood/trinket point of sale – it felt more like a mall than a “zoo.” Here’s the rest of the pics:
This was one of the more interesting ideas I saw – a tethered hot air ballon which gave patrons a nice view of the park. It was of course an extra cost above the admission price.
Animals:
I’d still like to visit the main San Diego zoo the next time I’m in town, but my personal feeling is that the newly renamed San Diego Safari Park can be skipped.
John B. Holbrook, II is a freelance writer, photographer, and author of ThruMyLens.org, as well as LuxuryTyme.com and TheSeamasterReferencePage.com.
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Admittedly, if all I had was a 24-105mm, I’d skip it, too. But for photo ops, with the right lens, it’s tough to beat…
Great pictures! Thanks for visiting, and if you’re so inclined, we’d love it if you joined our flickr group and added your pics to the group pool.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/sdzoosafaripark/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/sandiegozoo/