A Trip To Giraffe House

Did you know that there was a place called Giraffe House?  Neither did I!  Did you know that the Tygerberg Zoo doesn’t have a giraffe?  Neither did I – until I realised that this is the first time that I have ever seen a giraffe even though I have been to the Zoo about 10 times in my life.  How’s that for a Zoo fail (they also don’t have a zebra – this is Africa people, is it that hard to capture an animal and forever ruin it’s life in captivity?!  Really now.).  Anyway, I digress…  Terribly…

I first saw this place on a new friends Facebook photos (ok, now you know I am a bit of a FB stalker – time to de-friend me if you are worried).  Seeing as Kyla seems to LOVE “raffs”, we thought it would be awesome to take her to visit Gerry they jolly giraffe (alliteration people – the kids love it!)!  And boy was she excited!  Even though things kept delaying us actually getting there (like checking out her black thumbnail with the Doc – which is fine btw), she never forgot that we were going to the “raff now now”.

I must say that I really liked this place, it seems like well run and organised venue, and most importantly, it was clean – well as clean as an animal farm can be.  Normally at these things I feel like I need to take a shower to get all the floating animal poop off my skin – that’s totally normal behaviour.  It is relatively well priced and you get a bucket of food to take around with you to feed the animals (we didn’t have to pay for Ri cos she is under 2 just by the way).  Our only parent fail (of which we have hundreds – but managed to limit it to just one this day) was that we forgot sunblock…  I know right?!  Who does that!  So although it was so lovely there we had to cut our trip short to limit the risk of heat stroke, or you know, cancer and stuff.

There were monkeys that we fed through the wire – Ri absolutely loved this and laughed everytime they came and took a piece out of her hand.  

They were more interested in stealing/eating my rings than in the actual food and desperately tried to remove my rings with their suprisingly cold little fingers, especially on such a hot day.

Then there were goats that wanted every last bit of food that we had and tried desperately to get themselves through the fence to get it.  Kyla tried to make it easier for them by pouring the food out of her bucket – pity it was outside the fence, poor hungry, noisy goats.  Riya absolutely hated the goats!  Like really and truly hated it!  With a passion!  She was fine with the giraffe, the monkeys and the birds…  But get close to the goats and she lost it.  And actually for the poor zebra too…  In her defense the goats were quite in your face and a tad stinky!

Then there was the gorgeous Zebra who very nicely came to my calling of “come over little Zebra…  Zeeby come on…  Zebra please come here…”  – I might just be a zebra whisperer…

Then the grand finale – Gerry the Giraffe!  He is awesome!  Such a strange creature giraffes are, but oh so beautiful.  I love how he contrasts to Kyla in this pic, so cool.

Although all of those animals were lovely to look at, the highlight of the day was taking pictures of these beauties!  There were so many good pics, I didn’t know which ones to choose…

Kyla was harder to take pictures of, but when we did we got these absolute stunners…  Why the last one, well, she was so into feeding Gerry even though she couldn’t reach him, that she desperately dug to the bottom of the bucket to throw the last remaining pieces at him.  Always so interested in the well being of others – much love to you my precious girl.

Riya, ever the schmodel (yes this is a word – just say it out loud, it rolls off the tongue), gave us many more opportunities to be our muse, but in fairness I will post the same amount…  The bottom left is there because I normally post her posed “together” shots…  However…  That is not Riya…  This crazy haired monkey is my real Ri-Ri – love you so much my child!