Fasanolandia and Zoosafari

Lionesses

We had planned to visit the Sassi (Stones) di Matera in the Basilicata where Mel Gibson filmed his Last Passion of Christ. But a colleague of Hub's mentioned the Fasano Zoosafari and how much his kids enjoyed it - so being the indulgent parents that we are we changed plans and made our way to Fasano instead.

Fast food

Huge traffic jams. Long long queues of cars leading to the Zoosafari. We got pretty hungry and thirsty waiting in the car so when we approached the park we stopped in front of a few stalls selling porchetta, kebab and grilled sausages and had lunch. Steep prices and totally oily and sinful food. Yikes.

Zoosafari

18 bucks per head. I find it quite a rip-off. You sit in your car and get to see animals roaming about. The lines of cars were so long it was tiring. Besides, imagine the amount of pollution those animals had to suffer. Incidentally, having visited zoos in different parts of the world and especially the ones in Singapore, I found the animals in quite a bad state, certainly needing more care. And the whole place was just one big cage, you're not allowed to leave your car, you have to wind up your windows in certain enclosures (e.g. tiger, bear, lion...) and there wasn't much of any landscaping to talk about.

Bear

The ticket gave you entry to Fasanolandia - an amusement park with rides, dolphin shows, more animals, some kind of aquarium etc. On the day we were there, the queues were so long there was no way we could see or do anything, we had tickets to visit the Metrozoo etc but couldn't manage to get in.

Fasanolandia

There seemed to be a number of interesting rides but you need to pay 2 euros each to get on them. If you add them up, it would cost you less to visit a famous park like Gardaland or Disneyland. In fact that's what we would be doing next weekend, we'll go to Gardaland when the Hub takes part in his annual Golf Tournament at Lake Garda.