Day 25: Mr. Bean Goes to the Zoo — Matt Goes Exploring

I've had a slight itch to go to a zoo since Prague when I saw the exhibit on animals at their museum. So when I heard that Vienna has the oldest zoo in the world, I knew the time had come.

Today I broke the record for number of steps walked so far on this trip. The previous record had been set at 29,900 on June 27th. This was from the day in Munich that I spent watching surfers and wandering the great big park. The new record set today July 5th in Vienna is 33,746 steps (nearly fourteen miles). And I definitely feel it in my legs.

The main reason that the record was broken today was because the zoo is over an hour away by walking, even further than I was from the Vatican in Rome. But I am not one to shy away from a challenge, so I walked it. And then I walked all around the zoo, and then I had to walk back.

This slightly makes up for my lazy day yesterday in which I just barely missed out on my 10,000 step goal for each day.

But anyway, enough about steps, let's talk about what I did today. The Vienna Zoo is located in the midst of a large park fronted by Schonbrunn Palace. The Zoo is quite big, but still only takes up a small part of the park. There are many sights to see in the park, and just the hedges alone are a sight worth seeing. The groundskeeper for this park needs a pay raise.

Anyway, so the zoo. It had a great display of all kinds of famous animals; pandas, lions, elephants, rhinos, etc. I got there around 1:30pm and stayed until closing at 6:30, managing to sneak in a little extra time too, so technically I left at 6:40.

Perhaps my favorite animal, partly because I didn't expect it to be, was the gibbon. The apes had a large island connected to an indoor habitat that was all lined with robes and trees that they could swing from. The gibbons moved across the ropes and branches with such ease and fluidity I couldn't help but be amazed. One of them would frequently climb up to the top of the highest tree and sit, as if surveying the kingdom (see the thumbnail at the top of the page).

I managed to get a great slow motion video of one of them swinging around that I'm very happy about. I don't think I can include it here in this post, but check out my instagram @mattgoesexploring (link should be somewhere on this page) for the video.

The zoo also had arctic wolves. They were far away and resting, but I still got a good view of them. I would have missed them entirely if not for the kindness of strangers. I'm glad to see some things pass by the language barrier. I don't need to speak the same language as you to realize you haven't seen the wolves yet and to point them out to you. Makes me feel better about us as a whole.

This part is unrelated to any animals at the zoo, but there was one section of walkway that was suspended in the air among the tops of the trees. I'm not really sure why it was there, but it was nice. And I got a great view of Vienna.

When I went inside the penguin exhibit, which was partially outside partially inside, I expected to see some penguins, and I did. But I also got a heart-wrenching and heartwarming experience. There were Emperor and Rock Hopper penguins sharing one exhibit. One half of the exhibit was almost entirely rock hoppers, except for one Emperor penguin. The exhibit was water and rock, and this particular part of the exhibit was tiered somewhat like stairs, leading down to the water. The lone emperor penguin was at the top, and surrounded by rock hoppers. Emperor penguins are much larger than rock hoppers, but every time this emperor tried to walk past them, the smaller hoppers would shriek and lean forward with their sharp beaks, intimidating the loner. It became a ten minute struggle for the emperor penguin as it tried to escape to the lower part of the exhibit. The other zoo-goers around me watched as well. The penguin would walk close to an unguarded edge, only to realize it was too far to jump down, then would turn around and be cut off by the rock hoppers.

It seemed like the emperor penguin was hopelessly trapped when it finally made a mad dash past the rock hoppers and was able to jump to freedom, much to the delight of myself and many other zoo patrons around me. The Penguin had mustered quite the crowd. It's always good to see the underdog triumph. Especially if the dog is actually a penguin.

I will talk about one other experience before I wrap up this post, because I am tired. The zoo had a rainforest exhibit. You would enter into a humid building designed to be exactly like a real rainforest. In the back of the building is a room filled with bats. I didn't know that as I walked through the plastic strips that prevented the bats from leaving but let us enter. I stuck my head into the room and was greeted by the woosh of a bat's wings in my face. I jumped backwards at first, but it became quickly apparent that the bats would not touch me. I stood in the center of the room and watched bats circle around me in the dim light. In that moment, I became the Batman.

All jokes aside, it was a wonderful experience to force myself to trust the bats not to fly into me, and to have my trust rewarded.

After a long walk home so ends my second day in Vienna. I got my zoo fix in so now tomorrow I can focus on other things. I think the plan will be to find St. Stephen's Church, it seems to be a big landmark for the city and I've been told I should climb the side of it, whatever that means. We'll see where things go from there.

Until then, thanks for reading and here's to tomorrow.