We belong in the zoo...

Zoos and children go together like apple pie and custard – and for us adults this was a great day too. We spent most of it at Halls Gap Zoo. It was a very hands on experience compared to most visits to the zoo. Read on and find out.

Zac has wanted to do a ‘Meerkat Experience’ for a while now and they are booked up and hard to get into at Melbourne Zoo, so when we heard you can do the experience at Halls Gap, we locked it in as somewhere to go.

We got there on opening time and looked at some of the animals. We noticed a red panda, Gemma’s favourite animal. It was low down in its tree and it was feeding. We’ve only ever seen them as small balls of red fur high up in the trees, so this was quite a treat. We stayed and watched the red panda, snapping lots of cute photos.

Soon it was time for Zac’s meerkat experience and he was able to have 3 of the little critters crawl over him and feed them their breakfast out of his hands. The smile on his face said it all. It was a wonderful experience. As parents, it was wonderful to watch!

A large part of the zoo is through various enclosures, many of them open so you can wander with the animals. You can also feed a number of them from the bag of pellets you get on entry to the zoo. So that’s what we did over the next couple of hours.

The ostriches were a couple of real characters, following us up and down their fence line, pecking at arms if they ventured too close. How do you describe the sensation of being pecked by an ostrich? It’s not easy to do, but imagine if someone used a couple of thick books and clapped them on you… well it was sort of like that.

We found ourselves back at the red pandas at around 12:30 after having a bite to eat ourselves. The same keeper who took Zac into the meerkats was due to give a talk about the red pandas as well as do some training. The two red pandas were both young males, and are recent acquisitions by the zoo. Jet explained Gemma’s love of red pandas to the keeper and she had words with her boss and next thing, Gemma was in the enclosure hand feeding Mohan the red panda! Amazing! The zoo hope to offer a full ‘red panda experience’ in the future. Gemma was a guinea pig trialling how it would work!

Hand feeding the wallabies was another highlight for the kids, especially the one with the joey in its pouch!

There were tiny piglets who enjoyed a pat. Feeling their little noses was really cool, soft but firm, leathery… again hard to describe! Cutest bacon I’ve ever seen.

After the zoo, we decided to take a drive up Mt William, which is the highest mountain in the Grampians. Amazing views in a number of directions. The road stops nearly 2km from the peak and the walk is described as strenuous. We opted not to do it, but enjoyed the views from where we were, and with a few stops on the drive back down got ourselves some good pics.

That night we enjoyed another camp fire, this time we also cooked our sausages and potatoes in the fire. We were joined around the fire by friends we coincidentally bumped into who happened to be staying in of the park cabins.