Sunday found 8 or so of us, the core 4th Floor Team and a handful of associates, shivering inside of a pathetic excuse for a bus, steadily trundling our way towards Destiny. That’s right, we were headed to Safari Land. Just in case you’ve somehow forgotten, I live in Japan. This was a fact I had to remind myself as well, as my feeble mind tried in vain to visualize anything remotely resembling the plains of Africa in the land of samurai, shinkansen, sushi, and skyscrapers.

After disembarking from our rusty freezer on wheels, we were all fleeced to the order of 3000Y, and then unleashed upon the majesty, the wonder, that is… Safari Land!

As it happened, our first clue that we had mistakenly ventured into an alternate reality was the motor pool. Mistake not the true nature of these vehicles!

 

Before me lay not a water buffalo and tusked boar idly standing beside each other, but instead mammoth battle tanks simply posing as oversized African mammals. Note the armored wheels of doom! Disturbing encounters with bloodthirsty wild animals were not far behind!

This little fuzzball may look cute, but I assure you it could kill you with so little as a glance.

Here their true evil is revealed, note how the animal on the left is feasting on the bloody remains of wayward Safari Land visitors – the obvious explanation for it’s superior body size.

While I was busy documenting that horror feast, I had unwittingly fallen into a masterfully orchestrated trap. Having completely surrounded me, the boldest of the mangy man-eaters made his move. Only milliseconds away from certain death, I defended myself the best way I knew how – with a lightning fast jab right to the furry bastard’s head.

Realizing that lunching on my carcass was more trouble than it was worth, the kanga-rambos turned to the next nearest target – a pair of snap-happy Japanese girls.

The carnage was as bloody as it was efficient. I cannot bring myself to show you a picture.

In the midst of their pirahna-esque feeding frenzy, we saw an opportunity and made haste for the enclosure’s exit.

A short walk further took us to the monkey house. Happy as we were to be free of the killer kangaroos, we were unprepared for the simian madness contained therein.

The monkeys, we soon discovered, were all crackheads. In order to entertain the visitors, Safari Land kept their simian slaves on a strict diet of methamphetamine sunflower seeds. There were two kinds of monkeys in this monkey house, those freaking out on monkey-meth, and those sitting on branches with the shakes from the monkey-meth withdrawal. It wasn’t pretty.

The picture isn’t moving obviously, but just imagine that monkey sitting on that tree branch shaking like the Devil’s inside him. Maybe look closely at your computer screen and shake your head side-to-side to simulate the effect.

After a few minutes we discovered a cache of the monkey-meth that had been left out for Safari Land visitors to distribute to the monkeys.

He’s hopelessly hooked. His little monkey brain craves the sunflower seed of goodness, you can see it in his eyes!

Yes, yes you may have it my little furry crack-fiend(he’s on such a binge that he hasn’t even discarded the last shell yet!).

And sometimes, good people, you have to take some pictures just because you can…

Our next stop was an assortment of livestock pens.

After our immersion in meth-monkeys, we didn’t find the ox-things particular interesting.

Frankly the pigs were kinda gross.

And I swear they had the laziest damn goats I’ve ever seen, they wouldn’t even stand up, not even if you said “Hey goat, stand up!” Idiots.

Lazy that is, until I discovered the goatsnax. The very sound of me opening my little white paper bag of goatsnax brought the entire half dozen of the stinky buggers charging to the fence, clamoring atop one another to get even the tiniest tasty goatsnax morsel.

There are camera tricks, and then there are shameless acts of animal love, I leave this one to you to decide.

In the end, the goatsnax snaxtime ended quite abruptly as one of the sneakier goats managed to snatch the goatsnaxbag right out of my hand – and then of course eat the whole damn thing in three bites, bag and all. He is a goat, after all.

Our last stop before things went from bizarre, to insane, was the guinea pig enclosure. Yes, you read that right – this zoo felt guinea pigs were sufficiently exotic to display them as an exhibit. Even more entertaining was the enthusiasm with which my Korean friends cradled their guinea pigs, none of them ever having seen such a thing before. Congratulations, you are holding a 2lb rat.

Finally, it was time for us to partake of the actual Safari Land Safari. If you thought the preceding events were extremely unusual, your head is about to explode. Let me once again remind you of the vehicle in which we were to ride.

As we boarded we were directed to sit on one side or the other of a solitary bench seat that ran down the length of the Bison Battle Bus. In this manner, every passenger faced out either the right or left side. Looking for a place to stow my satchel while people were still filing onboard, I discovered this curious assortment of victuals beneath my section of the bench. ‘No,‘ I thought, ‘they’ve got to be kidding.‘

In short, they were not.

For the next hour, we bounced along from fenced enclosure (with guard tower) to fenced enclosure, stopping at a special area in each and every one to administer snackysnacks to whatever particular safari animal was lurking nearby. Things started off pleasantly enough with this ram of some sort or another…

…followed to my delight by a half dozen or so gloriously fat American black bears wallowing around the Bison Bus in search of tasty natural-behavior-corrupting goodness.

We then moved on to the lion enclosure. This was an interesting one because upon entering the perhaps 20 acre lion paddock, we came over the crest of a hill to see the lions down the road a ways below us, and perhaps 40 or 50 hawks soaring on the thermals nearby – which I later identified as Black Kites, Milvus migrans.

These are quite common birds in Japan, but unless someone was running a covert free-range hamster farm, there was no way in hell there was enough natural food to support such an incredible population density. My query was soon answered…

Not 3 seconds after I hung a nice fat hunk of meat with my iron shears outside the bars of the bus, a black blur with a 1.5m wingspan swooped streaking past the bus and cleanly removed it from my grasp. I’d estimate that for every 2 pieces of meat that made it into a lion’s mouth…

…1 was stolen by a plunging Black Kite. I wasn’t sure whether to be more astonished by this predatory prowess or by the fact that I had what was probably a 500lb kitty-kat waiting for me to toss it a chicken liver.

The fun didn’t stop there folks. Before the tour was through I had fed an American Bison and an African Elephant…

…feed the nose baby, feed the nose…

…was nearly accosted by a Giraffe…

…who later gave me a rather slobbery education in the length of said animal’s tongue…

…and got cozy with a dozen or so Bengal Tigers.

It’s hard to believe, but somehow this 400lb male Bengal Tiger can look as cute as a house kitten.

Talk about guilty sins. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve been told, or have read a sign in my life that said “Don’t Feed the Animals,” I could buy half of Alabama (the less crappy half). The whole time I couldn’t help but make comparisons to Busch Gardens back home. There you’ve got these multi-million dollar animal enclosures where people ooh and ahh from the other side of a deep moat and a very tall fence, and here I am in Japan – of all places – feeding chicken livers to a Bengal Tiger – through the metal grating – on the side of a bus – that’s shaped like a Bison…

What more is there to possibly say?