Whipsnade; Saturday, 04 September, 2021

I had a long lie in and a late breakfast at the hotel before heading out of the hotel and picking up the bus into Dunstable. I had a brief wander through Dunstable, including taking in the priory and market cross before grabbing a bit to eat in a café in the town centre.

I then picked up the last bus of the day out to Whipsnade – which given it was only just gone 13:30 says something about the bus service in Dunstable. It was a pleasant ride up onto the Dunstable downs and in less than 15 minutes I was being dropped off by the entrance to Whipsnade zoo.

My checkin to the lodge wasn’t due for another two hours so I had some time to look round the zoo. I started off by heading down to the Grand Whipsnade Railway. This is a small steam train that runs round some of the large paddocks, that would otherwise be too difficult to reach on foot. By pure chance I sat on the side that had the most animals on display and I got a very good view of the Elephants, Asian Rhinos and Camels before the train came back to its starting point.

The zoo is split into themed zones, based on where the animals would be found in the wild, and so I headed off into the Asian section, starting with the tiger enclosure. At London Zoo the previous week the tigers had been a little frisky as they were a male/female pair. Here at Whipsnade it’s three brothers, so they were just doing the usual cat thing of lying down looking at the rest of the world with contempt. From the tigers I wandered round past the Giraffe and White Rhino before arriving at the Lookout Lodges a couple of minutes before checkin.

Checkin was a smooth process taking just a couple of minutes to be ticked off, handed a glass of bubbly and shown to my small lodge that would be my home for the night. Checkin was at 16:30 and the zoo closes at 18:00 so after dumping luggage and quaffing champagne there was about 40 minutes time to explore near the lodges before we needed to meet again, so I headed the short distance away to the penguins and to take in the stunning views down from the ridge of downs that the zoo is perched on.

Guests reconvene in camp at 18:00 just as the zoo is being closed down, and shortly after we are the only members of the public left on site and our first tour of the evening takes place. We had two keepers with us for all tours with Laura and Patrick looking after us for the evening, Patrick staying on camp overnight, and then Lindsey joining us the following morning.

The first tour starts just opposite the lodges at the Eastern Bongos before moving onto the White Rhino – where we found out the name is a mistranslation, they should actually be Wide Rhino referring to their very wide mouths that they use to graze the grasslands. It was a short walk round to the African Hunting Dogs. The zoo has three, who are sisters, and spend their days together, including this evening all lying on top of each other in a corner of their cage. The next stop was round to the Chimpanzees who were expecting us as Patrick had their evening protein pellet meal to throw in to them.

With the chimps fed the next most important job was to feed the other nearby primates, namely us so we walked down to the base camp restaurant for a very nice evening meal whilst the sun set on the zoo.

After dinner we picked up torches and headed off into the dark of the night to explore the zoo. First stop were the flamingos, who were all merrily squawking away and having their dinner, then it was round past the Zebra to the Cheetahs. One of the Cheetahs had clearly had the message that they were on show and was lying on its heated rock so we were able to get excellent views of him. The same couldn’t be said of the lions on our next stop, who had all slumped right up against the windows of the viewing gallery making it almost impossible to make out anything other than a blond amalgam of bodies.

From the Lions it was then about a 10 minute walk back through the zoo and past the Rhino, some of who were now clearly snoring, and back to the lodges where we turned in for the night.