Husband and I went to a preview of the Asia Trail at the Zoo yesterday. It completely lives up to all of the hype, although sadly we didn’t get to see the sloth bears. Hey, for those of us who don’t get out much, a baby sloth bear is darned exciting.

The Asia Trail exhibits look spacious and natural for it’s animal inhabitants. It’s really hard for me to tell how well I think the exhibits are laid out for visitors, we were with a fairly small group and the rest of the zoo was closed. On a crowded day I suspect it’s not going to feel quite as spacious for the humans as it did last night. No matter what – it’s still a massively nice trail and a tremendous improvement. There’s significantly more room in the panda areas which will help things enormously, that used to be a really clausterphobic bottleneck. Probably as much for the pandas as the people.

The clouded leopard is even more gorgeous than his glamour shots on the web convey. If they hadn’t been tossing everyone out at 9:30 I’d probably still be standing there watching the leopard. The fishing cats were really cool, too, but there wasn’t any fishing action going on. The red pandas were asleep in a tree. You could see them really well (did the keepers put them in the trees right by the viewing area or have the red pandas been taking PR lessons from the giant pandas?)

The Giant Salamander? That is the stuff of nightmares.

As a bonus, when we first arrived we got to watch a Cheetah Keeper feed daddy cheetah some sort of goopy cheetah chow from a great big spoon, which was incredibly surreal. The nice Cheetah Keeper was giving us Daddy Cheetah’s biography so I didn’t think to ask what was for dinner. Sometimes you don’t want to know those things, anyway.

Of course, as one is required by law to always mention those attention-slut pandas, here is the obligatory panda story. (The pandas are fabulous and we do enjoy them, but we like to see the other animals, too. No hate mail please, there’s no anti-panda sentiment here). While touring the Asia Trail the slutty, slutty pandas were right up by the glass in their house snoozing away so we could ooh and aww to our hearts content. Daddy panda would periodically roll his eyes, survey the crowd and reposition himself for maximum crowd-pleasing. He was also doing something with his hind foot that lead more than one visitor to ponder aloud, “Do pandas masturbate?” but the presence of a few children was enough to let that question float off unanswered.*

But even that can’t compete with a man feeding a cheetah with a spoon. We’re rather partial to the cheetahs, as I’m sure you were already aware.

_______________
* The answer, according to The San Diego Zoo’s Behavior Ethogram and Protocal documents posted online, is “yes.”