Our Visit to France 2006

I first visited France back in 2006, when I was just 5, and this was the first time I had ever left my native Ireland. At the beginning of our trip, we first stayed in Paris at an apartment next to a friend of my mother’s. We visited the Paris Zoological Park in the hope of seeing elephants, which were my absolute favourite animal at the time, only to see that they had just departed the zoo. I was sorely disappointed, and we left the zoo immediately after this realisation while not caring to see anything else (though since then, I have expanded my interest to countless other species of animal, and become aware that there are literally tons of zoos with no elephants). After a few days, we then took the train down to west-central France, where we stayed at my grandfather’s summer house in the countryside. In that area, we visited three different institutions revolving around animals: Les Géants du Ciel, L’Île aux Serpents, and La Vallée des Singes.

Les Géants du Ciel is a flight show that takes place in the amphitheatre of the Chateau des Eveques, in the town of Chauvigny. Many different species of bird are featured in the flight show, including bald eagles, barn owls, griffon vultures, Harris’s hawks, white storks, kookaburras, and marabou storks. I remember a kestrel/peregrine (?) flying in and perching on top of my head while I was wearing my cap. At L’Île aux Serpents, we saw a number of reptiles, including spurred tortoises, veiled chameleons, green iguanas, and Burmese pythons, as well as meerkats (the only non-reptile kept there that I can remember).

La Vallée des Singes was definitely my favourite out of these three places. Located in the countryside near the commune of Romagne, the park is dedicated entirely to primates and was opened in 1998, the year my sister was born. In fact, the founder of the park, the late Wim Mager, had previously founded the Apenheul Primate Park in the Netherlands in 1971. Aside from gorillas, chimpanzees, lemurs, and marmosets, some of the primates at the park were firsts for us, including the geladas, barbary macaques, mandrills, and woolly monkeys. I remembered seeing the big male geladas, who looked quite intimidating with their blood-red eyes, and we saw the barbary macaques (or ‘magot’ as they are known in France) within a wooded walkthrough enclosure. I remember seeing the gorillas (one of whom, Kwanzaa, would become one of Belfast Zoo‘s breeding females), attending the chimpanzees’ feeding time, and getting close to the squirrel monkeys, marmosets, and tamarins in a walkthrough enclosure. At the end of our visit, we bought a handbook from the park’s shop about the primates of the world, including species not kept at the park, such as the proboscis monkey and the snub-nosed monkey.

In the years since our last visit, Paris Zoo had closed down in 2008 to facilitate construction works before reopening six years later in 2014. We revisited the zoo 10 years after our first visit, when we spent longer and enjoyed the zoo more, taking time to see every animal, especially the manatees. Before that, we revisited La Vallée des Singes in 2009 during a week’s stay at Grandad’s summer house. It was a rainy day when we visited the park, but that didn’t bother me, as I enjoyed seeing all the primates again. Later that year, the park welcomed bonobos, a species I’ve yet to see as of this writing. Les Géants du Ciel is still active today at the same site, but L’Île aux Serpents closed down in 2016, meaning we must have been lucky to visit it a decade before the institute’s death.