Wild Animal Park completes major project renovation

Covering 30 acres and costing more than $7 million, Heart of Africa in San Diego's Wild Animal Park is the largest improvement in the park's 25-year history. The new exhibit, which opened May 24, is an amazing place where animals roam nearly free. Enormous enclosures, some up to 125 acres, allow giraffes, wildebeests and other species to run and play and breed and carry on a somewhat normal existence.

If you've been to the park before, you know that guests observe inhabitants of the Serengeti Plains from the monorail, and while hiking trails allow a peek into the vast East Africa exhibit, guests were still kept out of the animals' domain.

Now when you stroll through the new Heart of Africa, you'll enter the animals ' habitat and be completely immersed in their world Of course, there are barriers, but visual animal barriers are absent. A 3/4 mile path leads past creature-filled waterways, with islands supporting inhabitants, much like in the wild. There are monkeys, flamingos, crowned cranes, secretary birds, ground hornbills, warthogs, bat-eared foxes and a man-made research station dedicated to the study of African wildlife.

According to the folks at the Wild Animal Park, "This will be the best African adventure money can buy-it offers the true essence of an African safari without the drain on wallets or the pain of malaria shots. We are offering our guests a trek into the heart of Africa that will touch their hearts forever." For general information, call (619) 747-8702.-DONNA IKENBERRY

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