In November I made two trips to Edinburgh Zoo on some days off that I had. The regulations in Scotland are currently that no-one should be entering into or out of the Edinburgh area, so at the moment the zoo is really for local visitors only – there are pros and cons to this, it’s nice to have fewer visitors (I went on both a morning and an afternoon, it was a little busier in the morning, but it was by no means busy) however this isn’t great in trying to help the zoo raise the funds it really needs to keep going. Despite it being November and a little cold and grey, with rain forecast on both of my visits, I had great trips with some great photography opportunities – hopefully you enjoy these pictures!
When I was thinking about planning my trip to China last year I focussed on going somewhere I hadn’t been before – other than Chengdu I’ve been to Xi’an and Beijing, and while I love those cities, I need to branch out! I also need to visit some smaller places (for example Guilin is high on my priority list, it looks beautiful!), but I was thinking I should tick off the major sites first – which brought me to Shanghai. In my research Shanghai Disneyland kept coming up on travel blogs and TripAdvisor, but I was a little apprehensive about going alone. I then searched on Youtube and came across videos by thisnatasha, who has been solo to Shanghai Disneyland and really made it look super easy, so I became sold on the idea! I started my 2019 China trip in Shanghai, spending 4 days there split between Disneyland and visiting the city – it’s safe to say that the 1.5 days I spent at Shanghai Disneyland are in my absolute life highlights of things I’ve done, I just had the best time there and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since!
Of course I couldn’t go all the way to Washington DC and only see the pandas – today I am sharing my city guide and what we got up to on our trip in September 2018. It was very hot on our first day, however that day then ended with a crazy rainstorm and we got very soaked! After that it was a bit of a damp and cloudy trip, however that didn’t spoil our time, just made for some dullness in the pictures but hopefully they still show the city and its attractions well.
I can’t believe it’s been 3 months since my first re-opened visit to Edinburgh Zoo! There are still limited numbers of guests allowed in the zoo, however it is more now than in July when I made my last visit. This time I had a week off from work so made a mid-week visit, I wanted to avoid the weekends as there would be a lot of school-age kids about, there are also quite a lot of tourists around the city too. I wasn’t sure I would have enough photos to share from another trip so soon, however we really picked a great day to visit – it was sunny and crisp, and it seemed like all of the animals decided to be active, well, apart from the pandas! But you can’t win on every visit, and the other animals really did make up for less panda activity. The one-way system is still in place, and is the same as it was back in July, however now a few of the indoor viewings are open, mainly the Budongo Trail and the koala habitat. We had to queue for the koalas, with only one group allowed in each of the viewing sections at a time. A staff member was manning this well, and we didn’t have to wait long but also found we had plenty of time to see the koalas. Masks are also required in indoor areas, e.g. the entrance, gift shop and indoor viewings. We weren’t sure if this included the cafe (take away only) or restaurant (sit in only, limited capacity), so we wore our masks in the restaurant until we were eating, and put them back on again to leave once we’d finished. And as per the last visit, there were hand sanitising stations around the zoo as well, and the recommendation to touch things as little as possible.
Following on from my post about seeing the pandas at Smithsonian National Zoo back in September 2018 I wanted to put together a post about everything else we saw on our two visits to the National Zoo. It’s a huge zoo and they have so many species to see and learn about, we really had a great time and really filled out two visits well with everything the zoo had to show! They have such a range of species from all of the large mammal favourites to many different reptile species in the specific Reptile House. This post covers all the areas at the zoo, but we didn’t quite see everything/get a picture of everything. The zoo is split into 3 main areas which are colour coded on the map, I thought this was quite useful and split the species quite nicely in the zoo, and so I’ve used the same areas to share about what we saw in this wonderful zoo.
