My friends and I had the pleasure of visiting Chessington last summer, overall it was a joyful experience jumping from ride to ride, making ourselves feel sick with the amount of sugar we were consuming.
Very last minute, before the park closed we decided to finally do the “safari” and well, it wasn’t worth the over an hour Que in the blistering sun with no shade.
As you got closer to the front the smell of diesel got stronger and stronger. Turns out it wasn’t a walk around safari like we imagined, its multiple safari trucks with on a loop circling round, collecting a group of people and taking them around the “safari experience”. At first we had no complaints, it was the end of the day and our feet were sore from walking around the park all day and from standing in long ques, and as I said we’d just been stood in the sun for a considerable amount of time so the sun exhaustion was creeping in.
We soon learned why this was not such a good idea…
As you enter the truck there’s a list of animals to look out for as we drive through such as; White Rhinos, Giraffes, Zebras, Sitatungas, Ostriches e.t.c.
We turned the first corner and we met with 2 Giraffes, both stood face pressed against the wall looking incredibly depressed, facing away from the trail, in their ridiculously small enclosure that was now filled with thick, grey carbon dioxide or diesel smoke being emitted from theses vehicles.
My friends and I immediately commented on how sad this was and instantly regretted coming on this “ride”.
We kept going round a small path looking to see anymore animals we were promised to see, but the only other thing we saw were a few antelope looking things tucked away in a far corner, presumably to get away from all the smoke and gasses building up in the enclosures.
I’m not exaggerating when I say the air was thick with heavy, grey carbon dioxide smoke, and the strong stench of diesel was giving me a headache, so it’s no surprise there were no animals around.
We stopped in a little cave thing and looked at some glowing flowers then circled back to the beginning again. Overall the whole trail was under 10 minutes, and the most depressing 10 minutes of my life. A classic example of humans exploiting and abusing animals for our “entertainment”.
Usually when people get off a ride you’re walking with a crowd of people excitedly chatting about how good it was, but after everyone stepped off this vehicle no one said a word, except from my friends and i loudly discussing how sad and awful it was.
This “safari” needs to be shut down immediately and those poor animals need to be checked over for depression and carbon monoxide poisoning, and it’s safe to say this put a bit of a downer on our otherwise quite pleasurable experience.
Please do not visit this part of the park, for those poor animals sake and your own. It is not a good experience for anyone or anything involved. And I do hope if enough people speak up about it then they’ll remove this “ride” completely.
Thanks for reading and share if you can to get the message around.