Hagenbeck Zoo, Hamburg Germany

The best thing about our visit to Hamburg was definitely the zoo.  We've kind of made a 'thing' about visiting the zoo in all the places that we visit.

The Hagenbeck Zoo is actually one of the best zoos we've ever been to.  It was obvious that they did quite a bit of breeding or, at least, acquiring quite a few animals in each of their exhibits.

The neatest thing about Hagenbeck, though, was that when you get there in the morning, you can buy food to feed certain animals there.  We fed the camels, donkeys, llamas, and the elephants, which were of course the BEST.  It was amazing to have a full grown elephant take a piece of fruit or vegetable out of your hand with their trunk.

In the African part of the zoo they have set up this amazing panoramic view that includes the mountains with sheep, African lions, then a plain of zebras, and finally a pond of flamingos in the front.  It was gorgeous to be able to look out and see all four in one view.

After the zoo we went next door to the Hagenbeck aquarium.  At first Jon and I kind of looked at each other like "This is it???", but as we wound through the aquarium (set up like an Ikea, one way in and one way out), it got bigger and better.  Their crocodiles were enormous, I mean huge, and again, they had several of them instead of just one or two.  At the end there was an enormous wall on the aquarium with large sharks and the biggest fish I've ever seen.

This sweet guy was ENORMOUS, enormous, but also alone.  He was one of the few that didn't have any companions.

The orangutan enclosure was amazing.  They had a little stream that ran through it with a little family of otters in it.  The otters would steal things from the orangutans and then they would steal them back.

This 'bubble' was the outside of the orangutans.

They had an interesting enclosure that actually had dinosaurs, or what they thought a dinosaur exhibit would look like.  It was interesting to see how big, etc.

Dad, is this an elk?  We couldn't tell, and all the descriptions were in German and so we didn't know.  It was HUGE, for sure and looked like what Jon and I thought an elk would look like.

There were two elephants.  This was the big one and there was another without tusks that you could feed as well.  But this big guy would kind of push the smaller one out of the way so that he could have all the yummies being fed to the.  It upset Joci that he kept pushing the smaller one.

One angle of the panoramic Africa view.