Wildlife Park

It's the "mid-semester" break this week (hooray!) so we went on a family trip to Jos Wildlife Park.  Sometimes we like to splash out on excursions so today we thought nothing of the £2 it cost for us all to get in (and that included a 200 naira fee for permision to use the camera).  After the health and safety consciousness of British wildlife parks the one in Jos is very refreshing, although Fraser did feel somewhat unsettled at times when all that was between us and a carnivore was a twenty year old chainlink fence.  There were no signs saying don't climb on the walls - some of the enclosures positively encouraged climbing up to look down on the crocodiles or snakes.  Parts of the park were like a secret garden of fallen walls and overgrown paths, many of the enclosures were not as big as we might like but the animals looked cared for and the staff were all friendly.    It was a refreshing change to wander round a wildlife park without freezing to bits (the last one we visited was Edinburgh Zoo) and instead of grey squirrels raiding the litterbins there were monkeys making off with titbits.  I did wonder if the black cattle wandering about were kept to provide food for the carnivores, especially when we saw the lionness and her cub gnawing at a jawbone after the meat wheelbarrow had gone round.

Not only did we see monkeys, chimps, tortoises, crocodiles, an elephant, hyenas, ostriches, a lionness with her cub and many other creatures but there was also a museum.  The Pitt Rivers in Oxford has nothing on the Jos Wildlife Park museum.  You enter to see an elephant head staring at you.  Go behind it and all the gruesome bits are still there.  There were creatures of all sorts preserved in glass jars, stuffed, dessicated and skinned.  Unfortunately many of them were moth-eaten and suffering from the effects of too much dust but it was certainly an experience.  I'm sure we'll be back.

Bee hives: the honey in Nigeria is much stronger tasting than in the UK