On Sunday we set out early once again, heading up the valley of the Cher a second time. Our destination was the town of Saint-Aignan, home of the ZooParc de Beauval — one of France's best zoos. It's big, modern, and — on summer weekends, anyway — packed with visitors. We got there at opening time and stayed for a good five hours, in broiling sun on a very hot day. But the zoo was definitely worth the visit.
As I mentioned, it's a fairly new zoo, dating back to 1980 when Francoise Delord ran out of room in her Paris apartment for her collection of birds and set up an aviary park at Beauval. Over the decades is has grown to include 35,000 animals from every continent. Building a zoo in the 1980s and 1990s meant that the Delord family could learn from a couple of centuries of other people's mistakes in zoo construction and operation. The enclosures are roomy, with plenty for the animals to do. I didn't notice any paths worn down by obsessive pacing by big cats.
The big draw at Beauval is their collection of giant pandas, courtesy of the People's Republic of China. (Apparently China considers all pandas — like many other things — belong to China no matter where they are or were born.) The exhibit is very posh, and features big flatscreens showing videos of various French big shots at the zoo to welcome the pandas' arrival. There's also a lot of frankly fawning text panels about how swell China is and how grateful Beauval is for the right to show the pandas.
I was actually more amused by a less showy exhibit, showing the famous North American Trash Panda (Procyon lotor).
Personally, I'm always as interested in the two-legged animals wandering around the zoo as I am at the creatures inside the enclosures. My estimate is that a good 95 percent of the people at Beauval were French. I think I spotted maybe one group that included at least some Americans, and I heard a British accent at one point. Saint-Aignan is about three hours from Paris by car — a little long but do-able for a day trip if you don't mind getting up early and getting back late, but perfect for a weekend. Pack up the kids and leave the Place d'Italie at about 5 p.m. on Friday, drive down with a stop for a nice dinner around Orleans, and book a hotel for two nights somewhere along the Loire. Spend one day looking at chateaus and maybe visiting a winery or two, another day at the zoo, drive back Sunday evening and you're done.
Hot and tired, we drove back to Tours along a scenic back-roads route recommended by the Green Guide, which passed through Montresor, one of the official Most Picturesque Villages in France. Dinner was at an adequate Thai place in Tours. There's an interesting guidebook waiting to be written, about the best "foreign" food in other countries — does Paris have better Vietnamese food, or Prague? Which European countries have the best Mexican food? And so forth.
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