Disney’s Animal Kingdom

Miss Potato Head
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After a much needed sleep-in we looked outside our room and saw Giraffe gazelle and other animals wandering around the savannah. They didn’t seem disturbed at all by the young children on the balcony below us yelling and screaming at them. They are obviously very tame.

Today was our first of three days exploring the theme parks at Disney World. A quick hop on the shuttle bus from the resort and at 10am we arrived at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. The plan was to work our way around the six main areas of the park in a clock-wise manner. First stop was Camp Minnie-Mickey – where the meet and greet was for all your favourite Disney characters. We took pictures of most of the characters, but I couldn’t resist getting a picture with my favourite Goofy! Here we also attended our first show of the day which was the Festival of the Lion King. This extravaganza had acrobats, singers and performers bouncing around the stage in costumes, singing our favourite Lion King songs. There were also enormous puppets of the main movie characters which was a real treat.

Giraffes, Elephants, Rhinos, Cheetahs, Lions and much more...

Nemo the Musical
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We then moved on to the Africa safari area where we walked the Forest Exploration Trail. Along the path we saw Gorillas, Colobus Monkeys, underwater Hippos, yellow backed Duiker and cute Meerkats. We then boarded our open air safari vehicle for the Kilimanjaro Safari. Here on the Savannas we saw Giraffes, Elephants, Rhinos, Cheetahs, Lions and many more species. It was then on to a brief stop at the Conservation Station, where among other things we saw humongous tarantula spiders and colourful frogs.

White Rhino
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We stopped in the Asia area for quick bite to eat before attending the Flights of Wonder bird show. Here they had many birds that they had trained to fly back and forth over the audiences heads into an entertaining show. It was then onto the Maharajah Jungle trek, where the animals were not so accommodating. It was too cold for the bats and komodo dragons to show themselves, but we did get to see tigers sunning themselves, a black and white Malayan Tapir and a number of colourful birds in the aviary.

Yellow Backed Duiker
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The next section to explore was Dino-Land – which was an area that reminded us of side-show alley at the ekka. We gave these a miss and decided to try the Dinosaur adventure. Here we boarded a time travel machine and were hurtled back in time to the crustaeteus period where we were chased and set upon by a large number of dinosaurs which had me screaming!! Once back on solid ground we made a dash for the Nemo Under the sea stage show presentation. This was a very entertaining stage musical with fantastic costumes and colourful set design. It was a shortened version of the movie story.

Resting Tiger
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As we left the theatre the sun was setting and the park was closing, so we decided to head for Disney Dowtown. No buses went direct from the park there, so some friendly locals told us which bus to get on that would get us to the closest drop off point and then we could walk. Once there, it reminded us of City Walk at Universal in LA. It was full of shops and restaurants and lots and lots of people. At World of Disney – the biggest Disney shop in the world, you could buy almost anything with some form of licensed Disney character on it. There was also a Mr Potato Head area where you could build your own Mr Potato Head with a multitude of parts – they just had to fit in the box. We found the Goofy sweet shop where you could get apples (toffee apple style), rolled in chocolate and coated in just about anything from cookie, nuts, lollies etc. We contemplated trying a skewer of marshmallows done in a similar style but decided it was better to get some real food into us first. You could also buy Minnie branded cookie mix or Mickey cookies, or chocolates, candy, and every Disney character as a Pez dispenser. We eventually stopped at Wolfgang Pucks and did the whole pizza and salad thing again, then headed off once again into the merchandise wonderland. At around 11pm we decided to head home and luckily walked straight onto a bus to our hotel. It had been a long day and I for sure was weary and keening for my pillow.