Disney's Animal Kingdom

A recent addition to Disney World is Animal Kingdom, which we visited today. We had a much greater appreciation of what we saw today due to the "backstage" insights we had gained last week when we took a "behind the scenes" tour which I reported on here (including info on nutrition, feeding, health care, and more for the animals.)

The warmer weather today allowed us to take the Kali River Rapids ride, on which everyone gets wet. Of all such theme park rides I've been on, this on has the most realistic and fastest rapids...



There are two walking trail tours in the park, Pangani Forest Explorations and Maharajah Jungle Trek, and both were fabulous, each with animals galore and each with aviaries populated with colorful and interesting birds such as this...



A popular attraction is the Kilimanjaro Safari expedition through an African savannah with giraffes, elephants, gazelles, rhinos, lions, and more...



We caught three interesting shows. The first was the 3D presentation "It's Tough To Be A Bug" which highlighted the important roles played by insects in the circle of life. Being 3D, photos cannot effectively convey the realism of the effects, but you can get an idea of how colorful it was...



The second show, "Flights of Wonder," had two human actors, but the real stars were birds. One took a dollar bill from a man's hand, and later returned it, and all the birds had something to show off, keeping all entertained, laughing, and impressed.



The third show, "Festival of the Lion King," featured an amalgamation of live actors, animatronics, music, singing, acrobats, and dancing in a non-stop, high-energy performance by "Lion King" characters...


A parade featuring Disney characters and a host of others had guests lining the parade route.



Our final attraction was "Dinosaur" which had us on a time machine vehicle traveling back 65 million years to save a dinosaur. Here's a photo taken of our car during the ride...



... after which I posed with Dino...



This brief blog post cannot possible do justice to the hundreds of animals we experienced today, so I have photos of 35 that I took today up on my web gallery for your enjoyment.

To see my other Disney posts, click "Disney" in the "labels" section in the sidebar to the right.