Today I met not one, not two, but five bears! It was a good day spent in Ueno zoo. 😛
I was hiking Mt Mitsumine at Chichibu yesterday but the heavy rain and enveloping fog did not let me finish. I pushed on, but it was too difficult to bash through the fog. I ended up having to scale a steep hill just to escape from the woods onto a highway. Despaired and drenched, I called it a day and headed back to Tokyo. I’m sure the view would have been great; if I were able to see it.
The weather was perfect at the zoo. Zoo is like a live animal museum. I could see wild animals so closely without feeling like they are going to turn my innards inside out. I really liked the polar bear – a mighty beast clad in snow white fur. I was wondering if its fur are too warm for it in this summer heat. Could humans snip them off and make a polar bear furcoat?
And I managed to catch the polar bears during their meal time so I got to see them dive into the pool for their grub!
At the bear hill, I was able to witness how an adult brown bear looks like at close quarter. I would have thought that I could defend against a bear attack with my swiss army knife, but when I met Mr.Bear I felt my pants loosen. Mr.Bear has paws complete with what look like 10 cm mean surgical blades. If I were to face an attack, I would have been vastly out-knifed. Note to self: Don’t bring a knife to a bear fight!
Ueno zoo is huge and has a vast variety of animals on exhibit. They also have myriad of smaller animal houses like the small mammal house, birdhouse, and the nocturnal den.
I feel very ambivalent towards zoos though. On one hand, I believe it is very important for us humans to be able to experience these encounters with live animals. This is to let us behold the beauty of the beasts, in the hope that we do our best to safeguard their worthy existence. Zoos are the only bridge connecting urban citizens to the wonders of the animal kingdom.
At the same time, I felt stricken to see these beautiful creatures behind steel bars and concrete. Wouldn’t they be better off living their lives free in the wild? Maybe not. Maybe these poor creatures have to spend the rest of their lives in captivity, so that the rest of their kind could live free.
Just look at the giant panda. Have they not been shown in zoos all over the world, WWF wouldn’t have had as much funds. People donate more to causes visible to them.
-Life behind bars. Bonus qs: what is the animal in the 4th photo above?
After seeing the living animals, I went to the science museum to see the dead ones. Tokyo’s National Museum of Nature and Science contains a whole lot of things to see. They have vast collection of fossils and stuffed animals in the museum. They make pretty good wax figures too! One section about humans had a whole tale of Japaneses ancestors sculpted in series of wax figurines. It was so detailed that I could see the wax fisherman sweat.
I stayed in the museum until its closing, barely covering half of the permanent exhibitions. I definitely would have stayed much longer as to see all it has to display. It is intriguing to see how we humans would dig up masses of earth to uncover dead things, just to complete a story we want to tell. As for myself, I like seeing these artifacts of the past. Makes me feel like a part of the ever growing and advancing human race.
That was it for the day!
The next day I actually went to Hakone, but it was also a tale of clouds and rains. The only noteworthy part was the peak of Owukadani, a live volcano:
Hot stuff.
Dashing Heights 