Singapore Zoo

Thursday March 16th – Today we leave for Australia but not until 5 pm, so we went to the Singapore Zoo which we have been wanting to do the whole time we have been here. They have a special program where you can “have breakfast with the Orangutans”. We thought that sounded pretty cool, so we headed to the zoo at 8:30am. What a fantastic experience! While you have a breakfast buffet the staff brings out an Orangutan, tells you all about them and then you get to go stand RIGHT NEXT TO IT and have your picture taken. The Orangutan here is Anita and while it’s hard to tell in the photo she is holding her 4 month old baby! She was so relaxed and calm the whole time. The baby slept and nursed and Anita ate bananas. The whole setup of this zoo is very unlike any in the US. The smaller primates are loose in different sections of the zoo and will come quite close to the people. In one picnic area we actually saw a medium sized primate taking food out of the hand of a person. Naturally people aren’t supposed to feed the animals, but you know how people are… Anyway, we had an amazing time. It’s not a very large zoo in terms of space but they have the largest primate population in the world and an incredible reproduction rate, particularly with the Orangutans.

We returned to the hotel at around 2pm as we needed to mail some GDB stuff to Australia. We had to mail the plaques and wood boxes back to the US as they were too heavy to carry as well. So we got to experience the Singapore Post Office! Yippee!

We rushed from the post office to the Singapore Art museum, which was small but good. Then it was back to the hotel to head out for the airport. Cheng met us at the hotel as he had arranged our transport again. We said our goodbyes after checking all our baggage. Amazingly enough we did not get any overweight charges although I KNOW those bags were heavier than 50#. Thank you British Airways!