No alarm again, we’re trained so well that we wake up at seven anyway. We look up the different animal parks in the area and decide to visit Planète Sauvage or ‘untamed planet’ zoo. It has a relatively small area for pedestrians, but 10 km of safari park to be visited with your own car. We decide to skip breakfast and leave the hotel around nine thirty, with nothing but wallets, phones, a sweater and some protection from the sun. We cross the Pont de Saint-Nazaire for the fourth time, it remains an impressive sight. Not just the bridge itself, but the great view of the shipyard building cruise ships right next to it.
We enter the animal park around ten thirty and when we ask the cashier about the business, she explains there are quite a few school groups visiting and advises to do the pedestrian tour first. It’s a fun experience, we can see that the park devotes time and effort towards conservation projects and there are a lot of guides around to explain more. Fortunately, they keep the young school kids occupied, so we actually have a quiet walk around. The highlights are the large cheetah enclosure, which you can see from a treetop trail, and the dolphin talk, which was fun to see as well as interesting to listen to. The safari ride is memorable (at least for me) for maned wolf (which I hadn’t seen before) and the cutest bunch of rhea (also known as nandu) chicks: they look like fluff on two legs. We wrap up the experience with an Nuii ice cream, haven’t heard of this brand before, but their New York cookie ice cream is delicious.
Febe writes 