“The visit of a four year old to nainital zoo”

Today I fulfilled my long awaited desire of visiting a zoo with my four yearold child. It happened in the beautiful ambience of Nainital. Visiting a place like Nainital always works wonders on me. The thing that scores best in this place is the’lovely misty weather’. I was really apprehensive when I had checked the weather forecast before reaching here. It predicted all rainy days , which I felt would spoil my trip. But it turned otherwise. In the past three days , the weather has been really unpredictable , but pleasant.

I am sure ,sitting among the floating clouds can really soothe anyone,s psyche. Today morning it rained heavily for many hours. I was not sure whether we would be really able to execute our plan of visiting the Nainital zoo. When my son Shreesh woke up, the heavy downpours had turned into drizzles. We got ready, packed our bags and started the uphill task of climbing almost hundred stairs near our home-stay.

After every eight to ten stairs, we used to pause for few minutes to regain our breath. Two cows standing on the stairs seemed to be really scary. But shreesh and I consoled each other and finally walked past them. Shreesh asked me why the cows had done ‘potty’ on the stairs in public while he always used toilets for himself for the same act. I could only smile to his innocence.

Finally we reached the entrance of zoo. There we clicked some photos of each other, took the tickets and entered our long awaited place for encountering a real ‘tiger’. It was ‘the moment’ for both shreesh and me when we came face to face with the Bengal tiger from few meters.the tiger was pacing restlessly in its cage. We sat in the shed nearby and kept watching the big-cat for some time. Shreesh recalled the tiger from his favourite video” jungle book” and said aloud” Mom , we shall name this tiger as Sherkhan.” Many people started laughing on this naming ceremony of the tiger.

To the two tibetan wolfs, who were running around in their enclosures, Shreesh named them as “Akadu-Pakdu”, the two wolf brothers of Mogli , again from The Jungle Book. Shreesh was fascinated by the famous black himalayan bear, especially by his pouty –mouth.

When we sat for some rest,Shreesh took out his toy-phone from his bag andstarted talking to his cousin Dev  telling him that he was busy watching tigers and bear and would later share all his experiences with him. One of our best experiences happened with leopards , many in number and sitting very close to the cage. One of them growled loudly and Shreesh ran away from there. Finally on our way back , Shreesh plucked few leaves as a medicinal gift for his father. When I asked him for what those leaves were, he explained that they were the medicines to be mixed in food so that the spices in thefood would not bother his papa.

So our lovely trip to the zoo ended with a short hello to the colorful pheasants and birds , where Shreesh memorised and revised his knowledge of colors.