The Darjeeling Zoo: Red Pandas Are Totally Weird

A standard Darjeeling view. There are good reasons to come here.

Whoa, tourist stuff in Darjeeling? Yeah, there's tourist stuff. You can get bored walking up and down hills after a while, especially if you're walking up and down hills in a crush of people and are realizing (too late) that there is nowhere to pee anywhere in the city, and there's like six or seven restaurants open at any-given-time that actually have things on the menu that are written on the menu (the Indian affliction). This is when Thou Shalt Tourist. So Tourist I did.

I went up to the Darjeeling Zoo and the Tenzing Norgay Climbing School, which are conveniently located in the same very-vertically oriented park a bit out of downtown. Catch a taxi down there; negotiate hard on the price.


Maybe this awesome sign has contributed to the low rate of animal harassment at the Darjeeling zoo. Note the lion.

Now: zoos in Asia. Horrifying conceptually, especially if you've been to one and have seen what passes for "animal husbandry" in many parts of the world. (What, we can't eat it, plow with it, or make clothes out of it? Why do we have this thing again?)

The Darjeeling Zoo is, thankfully, a notable exception and seems to be doing a pretty good job with keeping the animals both alive and reasonably happy looking. Big exhibits with plenty of foliage and greenery, toys are provided, there's handy explanatory signs, no one is throwing things at the animals or torturing them in lieu of anything better to do - I didn't feel like an asshole for paying to get in here. Also, the ticket includes admission to the climbing school and comes to around five dollars so you're looking at an economical day out.



Himalayan wildlife is reasonably interesting, and even has an adorable and charismatic Mascot Species, Your Cuddly Friend the Red Panda. (Red pandas are, if you believe the tourist literature, everywhere in Sikkim. Except for when you want to see them, but I'm told they're secretive).

They are cute little monsters who are, interestingly enough, not particularly closely related to anything else - they're usually stuck into their very own family of Ailuridae, a subgroup of Musteloidea, which includes skunks, racoons, and weasels. But they're not 100 percent on that one.

They also used to range all the way from China to Britain. Impressive for something so seemingly cute, fuzzy, and introverted. Unsurprisingly, the Darjeeling Zoo has a lot of them in a breeding program, who will either be found sleeping or pacing while waiting to be fed. Such is the way of zoos.

"Atcha, it won't move!" an old man kept on repeating to me while we both stood in front of the red panda cage, in a voice dripping with disdain and disappointment and misery. "Why won't he MOVE?"

"He's tired," I said. "Really tired?"

"I have this great camera," the old man said. "And the panda, he will not move. Why won't he move?" He sounded as if this was the great disappointment of his life. He had bought a nice camera, dragged himself out to the zoo, and now the panda wouldn't move. Maybe he was considering killing himself over this. Maybe it was the straw that had broken the camels back, the final disappointment in a long and generally disappointing life. I felt genuinely worried for the old man, for a moment.

"Atchaaa!" he said, and moved on to the cages next door, which contained exotic pheasants.

"Why won't the birds MOVE?" I heard him complain, five minutes later.



A pair of shockingly cute leopard cats, a domestic cat sized wildcat that lurks throughout South and East Asia. They can be found just about everywhere in Asia if you look hard enough (they don't want you to find them).

They're cross-bred with domestic cats to produce the lovely Bengal cat breed, which makes sense, since just look at those little carnivorous felid faces. Awww, damn, I want one.



A pack of Asian wolves, not doing a hell of a lot, as is probably their wont. They're lovely animals. A wolf is pretty much a wolf wherever you are in the world, with minor structural differences - and wolves are scarce indeed in India - so I won't harp on them too much. But everyone loves wolves! Except for Idaho cattle ranchers and people who live in poorly lit and remote villages in Uttar Pradesh. Then you have a problem.



My general opinion on bears is that they are dickheads. This is confirmed by a family friend who has been known to declaim loudly that bears are assholes to anyone who will listen. However, I'm rather fond of sloth bears, which are smallish, reasonably in-offensive, and really don't seem to care about much beyond foraging for food and taking extended naps. I mean, they subsist primarily on insects. Of course, they will nail people on occasion - I like this particular account of sloth bear attack....

According to Robert Armitage Sterndale, in his Mammalia of India (1884, p. 62):

[The sloth bear] is also more inclined to attack man unprovoked than almost any other animal, and casualties inflicted by it are unfortunately very common, the victim being often terribly disfigured even if not killed, as the bear strikes at the head and face. Blanford was inclined to consider bears more dangerous than tigers...


Another: "Captain Williamson in his Oriental Field Sports wrote of how sloth bears rarely killed their human victims outright, but would suck and chew on their limbs till they were reduced to bloody pulps."


Well, that's charming!

The Darjeeling Zoo has a lot of other animals beside these specimens, of course, except I was unable to get even half-decent photos of any of them. This was mostly due to operator error. There are also tigers, snow leopards, panthers of both the black and generic variety, more civets then you could imagine existed (The Himalayas possess a totally inordinate number of civets), and a whole lot of pheasants in increasingly surrealist colors and designs. Evolution has done very strange and perverse things to Himalayan pheasants.

There's also monkeys, but I hate monkeys and spend as little time looking at them as possible. Furthermore, you are likely to be assaulted by or at least menaced by a very large monkey with big sharp teeth and a pissy attitude at some point in your Indian Adventure, so why would I pay to see them? Pshaw.

I would add that, being a single blonde female and therefore a massive megaslut in the minds of many (I won't venture to say the MAJORITY of, but..) Indian males, I spent a lot of time being observed and photographed at the zoo.

Actually, I'd be observing or photographing an animal, and six or seven teenage boys would be observing and photographing me. While giggling a lot.

Apparently the multi-faceted wonders of zoology take a back seat to ogling sweaty foreign woman when you're an Indian guy of a certain age, I guess.

I wish I could have attached a DO NOT TEASE THE FAINE sign to my ass at that point, but it might not have worked the way I would have liked it to.

The Perth Zoo and Awesome Laksa

Australia has weird animals. This may seem blindingly obvious, but their weirdness is really quite interesting on a biological level. Australia's long term isolation and the curious dominance of marsupials means that its critters move, behave, and look very different from most of their foreign counterparts. Australian animals entertainingly and creatively fit the niches that animals like deer, pumas, squirrels, and foxes fill in other regions, swapping out different traits and means of locomotion for others as they see fit. As an amateur evolutionary biologist, I totally plotz when I get to see Australian animals in the flesh.

Australian zoos are especially fabulous because they can (obviously) acquire creatures that just aren't exported to American collections. Tasmanian devils, numbats, bilbys, potoroos, frogmouths and other oddities are common enough in Aussie collections and extreme rarities elsewhere. Naturally, visiting the Perth Zoo was high on my priority list, and it luckily didn't disappoint. It's a small but extremely well cared for and laid-out collection, with impressive landscaping and plenty of room for the inmates to roam. The nocturnal exhibit is especially good - a great chance to view a lot of Australia's native mammals in their natural, darkness loving state. And haven't you always secretly wanted to see a bilby? Come on, don't lie to me. I can see it in your eyes.


The Jabiru, Australia's iconic wading bird. This one was having an exchange of opinions with the small kingfisher nearby, which got all fluffed up, stabbed at the bigger bird, and made pissed off AWK AWK sounds. The whole thing pleased me more then I can say.



Blue tongues are fairly ubiquitous in Australia, and are regarded with some affection by most locals. They're affable, fat little guys who often sneak into homes through dog doors and steal the family pet's food. They also lay waste to garden snails and other backyard pests, rendering them very popular as backyard pets. They don't do a hell of a lot. As in, nothing whatsoever. Their toungues really are electric blue, in case you ever got the urge to french kiss one.



Frilled lizards are fantastic creatures, and I didn't really know just how much so until I saw one in the flesh. The keeper was flipping the little blighter crickets, which the lizard ran about partially on two legs in a hilarious shambling motion to get at. He half-heartedly put up his frill when poked gently but obviously was not feeling threatened enough. They're incredibly endearing and surprisingly intelligent looking animals - sort of like scaly little bulldogs.




This is a fairy penguin, WA's native penguin. They're very common at Penguin Island, near Rockingham, and can be fed and ogled by tourists who take the ferry over. I'm fairly indifferent to penguins but these are scruffy and cute little buggers. They float on the surface of the water and only rarely dive, so don't expect astonishing underwater acrobatics from them. They mostly stand around on land and look discontent during the day, which is nothing if not cute.



This is a Bush Stone Curlew, and it is nesting, and it is profoundly apprehensive. I always wondered why birds in zoos don't become totally accustomed to having people staring at them all the time. This could be related to the fact that they're birds.


Here's more on the mighty Bush Stone Curlew. The picture of one freezing into a bizarre position because HOLY CRAP DANGER is very, very amusing.





Grey kangaroos sunbathe in a fashion remarkably similar to our own. Down to shifting around and grunting when the sun moves. I feel you, man. I feel you. At the zoo, the kangaroos are allowed to wander around and follow their hearts vis a vis interacting with tourists. Since you can't feed them here, they ignore you completely. Kangaroos are capitalists too.

I looked for the adorable and striped numbat in the impressively leafy numbat exhibit, but couldn't find it (shocker). The numbat is one of West Australia's native marsupial predators and is also among its most endangered, having been pushed out of its habitat by invading species, primarily foxes and cats. The Zoo participates in the enormous Western Shield program, an ambitious attempt to protect native species and eradicate interlopers throughout the west coast. They conduct fun events like annual toad drives, wherin you can stomp on (horrifyingly large) cane toads in the name of conservation. I want to do this very badly. In fact, it seems like about a third of the exhibits at the Perth Zoo have a sign discussing the evil and duplicitous ways of cane toads, in case you didn't get the point at the other 35. This is actually not excess, though - a little research on the cane toad reveals these South American aliens really ARE that bad.



This is obviously a crocodile. However, crocodiles are goddamn terrifying. It is hard to express how true this is, especially if you've never seen one of these primitive horrors in the flesh. It sort of makes you question religion. And maybe the nature of creation. Maybe the universe is actually a hostile and cruel place that is actively out to get us and devour us and make our lives deeply unpleasant, maybe end them quickly and horrifyingly in a splash of blood, gore, and violence.

After the zoo, I ambled over to the waterfront at South Perth, which boasts a large number of extremely expensive cafes full of people with the benefit of expense accounts. Not being among their numbers, I trekked around and found Munch Delight, a lovely Singapore-Malyasia cafe in a small shopping center. Superb. Even more pleasingly, it was very reasonably priced, akin to finding a magical Unicorn in Perth's panoply of ridiculously expensive restaurants.



A big bowl of seafood laksa, and very well executed indeed. I loved the rich, extremely pungent flavor of the seafood in tandem with the chili and the coconut milk. It's definitely strong stuff so should be avoided by those who don't free base fish sauce (like me). A winner.



I also horked down a plate of sauteed greens with garlic sauce, which is simple, sorta healthy, and among my favorite things to eat in the world. These were super rich, generously served, and had a lovely topping of crisp garlic. Aces.

Caversham Park: Kangaroos, Barramundi Wings, Horrifying Emus

The sign into Caversham Park. Yeah, I know. It's perfect. Sort of disgusting how much so.

Humans have a weird affinity for fondling wildlife. It may be fuzzy and adorable or scaly and horrific, but whatever it is, we want to poke at it. I suspect this is an extension of a childhood desire to poke at things with a stick to see what will happen - to touch an animal is to truly experience it, and to some extent, master it. We have poked it and has not bitten our hand off, injected us with venom, or pissed in our eye. The unknowable has become knowable.

Petting wildlife also provides Japanese tourists with endless, endless amusement.

Caversham Park is a privately owned wildlife park situated about twenty minutes outside Perth, just out enough in the bush to be comfortable, and close to the Swan River wine region. The park features a very impressive selection of native animals, grouped by their native regions in the Australian continent, and housed in nice and well kept-up enclosures. (Nothing is more depressing then a poorly maintained zoo, let me tell you). We're talking Tasmanian devils, horrifying emus, dingos, cassowaries, wombats, numbats, crocodile,s and a profusion of other beasties on display and for your amused perusual. There's a huge kangaroo paddock featuring a mess of kangaroos for the petting and fondling of admiring tourists. And there's koalas. A huge quantity of them, feeding on ecualyptus like brown, fuzzy, and obese parasites. Excuse me, "drop bears."


Not a koala but instead a kangaroo giving me the "Whassup man, pass the chocolate nachos and the bowl" sort of stare. I doubtless met this guy at a Tulane college party in a former life, holding a beer-bong and wearing an ironic dinosaur t-shirt. That guy.

Disclaimer: Folks, koalas don't do shit. They are like pandas: complete and utter failures at the basic act of existing. Their chosen diet of ecualyptus is so nutritionally unsound that they literally have the energy to do nothing but eat or sleep all day long. Why are people so bizarrely obsessed with the damn things? Is it because they resemble teddy bears? I hated teddy bears when I was little. I favored plush sea life, preferably with claws and beaks and a delicious flavor when sauteed in butter and shallot. Screw koalas. I hate them. Bet they don't even taste good.

Maybe I need therapy.


The park has a couple of Tasmanian Devils, one of which was this geriatric but well cared for specimen. This guy appears to be roughly 90 by Tasmanian devil standards and regarded us with the sort of stare one directs at kids you wish would pipe down, put away their Playstation thingamugs and let a tired old man sleep. We duly left. As a side note, Tasmanian devils have gigantic heads and jaws, and can doubtless bite the shit out of you when not incredibly aged. In case you encounter one out back sometime soon.


The Kookaburra is one of Australia's animal emblems, and for good reason. They make a distinctive, insane sounding laughing call, and they are absolutely adorable, with little feathered bodies perched on top of small and grasping feet. This lovely specimen was displeased with our presence and kept on making disgruntled "SQAWW" noises at us to register its discomfort and embarrassment. Scuse' me, small wetland bird.


Barn owls do live in Australia, although they are not particularly exotic. What they are is hilarious, especially in large numbers. I just have visions of these owls peering through the window at some unfortunate person showering, and visions of their horrified, wide-open eyes. The owls disapprove of you, sir. The owls are terribly disappointed.


Emus. These were agitated by my electric blue coat, and persisted in strutting around angrily and making throaty "thrum" noises at us. It is hard to express how profoundly unnerving this experience was, sort of the closest thing we humans can experience to being menaced by hairy and extremely stupid dinosaurs. I would probably piss myself if I came across one in the wild. We should eat them all.


The park puts on a Wombat and Friends exhibit, which basically entails a hefty park ranger hauling an equally hefty and profoundly laid-back wombat out onto a platform for the pleasure and edification of the public. The public in this case was a profusion of Japanese tourists, who squealed KAWAII NE over and over while shooting hundreds upon hundreds of photos of themselves con wombat. The wombat didn't care. I am not sure anything short of a nuclear attack could faze this wombat. As a friend of mine remarked on Facebook after viewing this photo, "I can picture him chilling on the couch smoking a bowl, trying to forget his social awkwardness and anxiety when dealing with strangers- but being adorable while he does it: "Man, you wouldn't believe work today- pass the Cheetos." This is, I think, accurate.

There was also a local possums out for the petting, which was a hell of a lot cuter and more charismatic then our reptilian American possums. They're really not closely related, other then their both being marsupials.


Then it was time for the Highlight of Caversham, which is, of course, up close and personal interface and interview with kangaroos. Which was, I must admit, pretty awesome. Kangaroos are pretty charming beasts and when properly socialized, are very good with people, who will good-naturedly shake you down for food and scratches under the chin. Sort of makes you wonder why they're not commonly kept as pets. The answer will be revealed by a cursory search for Youtube videos of kangaroo attacks. Male reds can get up to 6'6 tall on their hind legs and can kick hard enough to disembowel. Gracious. (Video of a kangaroo kicking the stuffing out of a guy in a stupid costume on a children's show. Life sustaining footage, really).



This guy was getting up in my bidness. They have a way of putting their weirdly human hands on your own hands to make damn sure you don't move away your roo kibble holding hands until they're finished. Kangaroo got your number, punkass.


D'aww. I think they're pretty cute. I like things with long noses. Former rough collie owner.


SUSPICIOUS KANGAROO
IS SUSPICIOUS



For lunch, we headed a little ways outside the park to the Feral Brewery, an artisian, well, brewery that just happens to have really fantastic food and a surprisingly daring menu. I didn't try the beer as I have not yet been able to talk myself into liking it (Yes, I know, and shut up), but my aunt and my cousin are very fond of their stuff, and it has won all manner of awards. I cut my losses and ordered a tasty and crisp glass of their house-made Chenin Blanc instead. We sat outside on the patio and enjoyed the uncharacteristically balmy winter weather.


My aunt decided to hedge her bets with small bites. These are polenta cubes with pear salad and blue "vein" sauce. Very elegant little bites, and the combination of blue cheese and rich, eggy corn was impressive.


These puff pastry chicken parcels were also excellent. Buttery and light pastry, and a tasty, slightly curry like filling. Would be great served on crystal at a fancy party. These guys obviously missed some sort of memo vis a vis "crappy brewpub food". For shame.


I ordered the barramundi "wings," which turned out to be equivalent to hamachi kama, or fish necks. I am a total freak for hamachi kama and thus went absolutely nuts for these. Lots of sweet, delicious barramundi meat and plenty of little bones to negotiate, served with a lovely lemon aioli dipping sauce. I ordered a side of their lentil dahl, which was also flavorful (although could have been more spicy) and very tasty indeed. What an excellent lunch.

We "toddled" down the road (Aussies love saying that, don't ask me okay) to Lancaster Wines, which has a nice outdoor tasting booth and a large selection of fine boozes for the sampling. The exceedingly friendly British guy manning the table proceeded to drink us up with everything he had on offer - standouts included a fruit-forward Chenin Blanc and a seriously good fortified "Sticky" shiraz. Well worth a visit.