Trips about Zoos
Big Cats, Hot Springs, and Liberia
Please see the first post on Costa Rica for important details about this post.
After spending the night in Cañas, we got onto the Pan-Americna Highway (one of the few fairly well maintained roads) for the trip to Liberia. We did make two stops along the way. The first was at the Las Pumas Rescue Shelter - a large facility that houses rescued (mostly injured) wild cats and has jaguars, ocelots, and other big felines. Unfortunately they were all in wire cages so pictures were not easy to take.
Leaving the shelter, we continued north on the highway to the hot springs called Thermomania near Volcano Miravalles. This is a small water amusement park that uses the water from hot springs and is a lot of fun. Its also much cheaper than the super fancy hot springs around Mount Arenal (the fanciest of which is also right along the lava flow path should Mount Arenal ever have a large eruption).
We finally arrived in Liberia and decided to spend the night in a nice air-conditioned motel very similar to ones in the US. The air-conditioned aspect of it proved to be very helpful the next day. Liberia itself seemed like a nice enough city - definitely smaller than San Jose but also much cleaner and friendlier.
San Diego Zoo
Over the President's Day weekend, Lydia, my then girlfriend, and I took a trip to San Diego to go to the zoo, whale watching, and Cabrillo National Monument, among other things. The San Diego Zoo is considered to be one of the best in the country, and this is a small sample of the animals we saw there.
San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park
Since my parents, sister, and niece were all visiting this week, we decided to take a day trip down to the Wild Animal Park today. Unlike most zoos, a lot of the animals here are not kept in cages but in large enclosures that house more than one species (though, as was pointed out to us, predators and prey are kept separate).
Along with the usual large number of species, we saw two critically endangered species - one California Condor and two Northern White Rhinos. I have pictures of both, along with many of the other animals, in the Wild Animal Park Gallery.
Arizona-Sonara Desert Museum
After getting back from Kitt Peak and spending a day at Saguaro NP, I spent the next day (just before returning to LA) at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, which is really more of a zoo than a museum. While there were certainly plenty of the cacti I had seen the previous day, the primary attraction is getting to see the wildlife that aren't that easily seen at the national park. Besides all the desert wildlife, there was also a controlled flight demonstration with some Harris hawks, which was very interesting. Definitely an interesting destination.
Washington DC
A week and a half after getting back from Arizona, I headed to New York for the holidays, and then to Washington DC for this winter's AAS Conference. While there wasn't much particularly amazing at the conference (at least photography-wise), I did spend a few days afterward wandering around Washington DC. A bit colder than California, but I didn't mind too much (well, perhaps the mid-twenties temperature with brisk wind was a bit low for wandering around the Mall). I did stop by the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress, and spent half a day at the National Zoo (where not all the animals were hiding because of the cold). Plus, I got to see the original spectrograph from the Palomar 200" telescope at the Air and Space Museum, which made me very glad that we now use computers at observatories.
