The Lujan Zoo
Today, my roommates and I discovered one of BA’s finest treasures: Lujan Zoo. Located only an hour from the city, Lujan Zoo is a sprawling zoo that allows you to play with and interact with all the animals inside it. The zoo is most famous for its abundance of lions and tigers; even more striking is how peaceful and loving these animals are. Accompanied by one of the many helpful zookeepers, visitors can actually go inside the animals’ dens and pet, feed and hold them! While the big cats are adorable (we fed one lioness milk from a bottle – too cute), it is the cubs that really get to everyone. The tiniest ones are about the size of a miniature poodle (I know, I have the frame of reference of a true animal lover), and the ones we played with were only eight weeks old! As if cuddling with them didn’t make us squeal with delight enough, the cubs were raised with newborn puppies as well, which serves to make the cubs more gentle and domesticated. I have truly, in all my 21 years, never witnessed something so utterly adorable and heartwarming – totally worth the little cub that peed on my shirt, soo not a big deal.
Lions and tigers and puppies!
After the cute-fest that was the cub den, we made our way over to the camel area. Naturally, we were super excited to ride the camels – we had signed up for the ultra-interactive zoo tour, which made this possible – and it did not disappoint. Despite the brevity of the ride (it was maybe two minutes total), it was really fun and our camel was a perfect gentleman: he gently accepted our offerings of bread and carrots right from our hands. Finally, our last stop at the zoo was the elephants. There were two Asian elephants (meaning they have floppier ears than other non-Asian elephants, according to our tour guide), and we all took turns feeding them apples and oranges and posing underneath their trunks. As usual, I’ll leave everyone with a few photos to recap the day, in the hopes that it will persuade any and all visitors to Buenos Aires to go to Lujan!
Riding a camel.