Sea World

By now we had run out of ready cash (having only taken a small amount of ready money in dollars with us) so we had to get up a bit early to go find an ATM machine before heading to Sea World. Turns out there were lots of them in the actual theme park so we needn't have bothered. Anyway after paying the $10 parking at Sea World we headed into the park.

Another brilliant day. SeaWorld in Orlando is on the same block as Discovery Cove and is owned by the same people. Infact most of the Discovery dolphins started off in SeaWorld. It is much larger and even with a map we found the layout quite confusing and kept loosing our bearings.

There is so much to see, and thinking we only had the one day to cover it all, we didnt spend as long as we would have liked on each exhibition. But it was still a great day.

We started off watching the giant turtles swimming about but as not much was happening here we moved into the Penguin enclosure. The Penguins are housed behind glass in conditions as near representative of the Pole as is possible, which means it is kept so cold that it does actually really snow and the keepers have to be bundled up in loads of cold weather gear to interact with them.

I could have watched all day but we moved on to the next part where puffins were kept behind glass in a similar way. Americans are so good at showmanship, and even here, appropriate 'puffin movement' music was being piped into the spectator hall (hopefully not to the Puffins though).

There are about 6 shows running throughout the day but the dolphin and the Shuma shows are the most popular so you need to plan out your day carefully and make sure you are at the right perfomance places well in advance of the start times. We were absolutely wrapped with the dolphin show which is very powerful,very colourful, with lots of trapeeze artists interacting and performing with the dolphins and small whales. We were astonished when suddenly 8 blue maccaws flew around the stadium in time to the music and even more surprised when a large black eagle joined the show.
Of couse it is always the non-performers who take part in the show who steal it, and it was the wild storks who were attempting to steal the dolphin's fish around the back of the stage who caught our eyes and made us smile.