Jungle Island

This weekend Uday and I decided to head down to Miami, Florida to visit Jungle Island. This wonderful place is one of those places that we have alway said, "I want to go there some time..." and then never go. Uday and I decided to try and continue to do as much as we can in Florida and take advantage of all it has to offer. We have collected a large stack of brochures of places we want to visit in south Florida and are almost half way through. Sometimes the more places we visit, the more we find out about other places to visit.

We really enjoyed this adventure to Jungle Island. We especailly enjoyed the bird show, reptile show, and the tiger show. This place used to be called Parrot Jungle and was full of beautiful parrots and macaws. For, me it was truly amazing to feed and pat the kangaroos

and hold and feed a baby tiger.

This experience also reminded me that sometimes one does not have to travel the world in order to encounter such awesome, once in a lifetime experiences. For us, it was practically in our backyard.

While we were there, we also talked with one of the girls, named Dulce, who was in charge of taking care of the monkeys, tigers, and Ligers who volunteered for the company called T.I.G.E.R.S. We learned that the Liger is part lion and part tiger. When a male lion mates with a female tiger, the resulting cub is a Liger, and when a male tiger mates with a female lion, the resulting cub is called a Tigon. A Liger is one of the biggest cats there is and can weigh about 1000 pounds! Whereas, a Tigon is dwarfed and weighs about 400 pounds. Dulce also reported that all of the people involved with working with the big cats volunteered and lived on a reservation and were given food and shelter for working the show and taking care of the animals. She told us that she works 7 days a week and this is her only life. Dulce was in her early to mid 20's and she also stated that it took her a year to get into the program.

During the reptile show, Uday was one of the participants picked from the audience to help hold a Burmese python, 15 feet long!

Living in Florida, we often come across alligators, but it was very interesting to see a humongous salt water crocodile (which they called the crocosaurus and was from Indonesia) quietly soaking up the sun. It felt like we were looking at a pre-historic monster. You will see pictures of it in the link we have provided below. Uday was even more amazed by the albino alligator! This was a completely white alligator and Uday had never heard nor seen such a thing before.

Beware of checking out the rest of our pictures as you might just get Jungle fever yourself!

Click on the picture below to see all of our other pictures.