5/20/2023
We have finally entered the sanctuary! 🙂
Butterfly World opened in 1988 and is the largest butterfly park in the world. It is home to about 20,000 live butterflies. Imagine beautiful butterflies fluttering freely among beautiful plants with pleasant music playing in the background. A feast for the eyes and the soul! You can walk here for hours.
If you are very lucky, a butterfly will land on you and rest there for a while.
Csibi was very lucky twice, and the blue butterfly (the most beautiful one in our opinion) thought it would be nice to rest there for a while.
It is quite difficult to photograph the blue one, especially. When it flies, you can see its beautiful blue wings, but when it sits on a flower its wings are closed, and it is brown. So, this was a challenge in 2017 and still is!
We walked for a few laps, and finally hunger got the better of us because we decided to find some food and then continue on our way.
Because, of course, butterflies are not the only creatures that live here.
When you leave butterflies, they check your bag too because the butterfly might as rest there. By the way, butterflies are protected by law. You are not allowed to steal them, etc. One butterfly was lying on the ground - unfortunately, if you don't watch your feet, you might step on it… We don't know what happened to it, I just saw a girl pick it up and put it in her bag… I'm not sure if it was a good idea, but we don't know how it turned out.
So, we left the butterflies for a while. Luckily, you can go back - you make a lap and can still go back to them through the gift shop.
There was a small buffet open outside, we bought some simple little sandwiches, about a bite each, and drank green tea, which was very refreshing in the heat.
Once we were done, we went on our way. We stopped at the cute little parrots and other beautiful little birds. They are so pretty too, you can spend a lot of time gazing at them.
You can see the birds very close up, some of them will let you get quite close. Some fly past you with so much momentum that they almost hit you!
Then there are the happy and colorful parrots. Here you can feed them for some money, and they'll sit on your hand, so if you want that experience, you can have that too. We just watched them chirping at each other.
There's a kind of little museum called Bug Zoo, which we didn't visit in 2017. We saw that there are all kinds of bugs here and well, we don't like them very much. But this time we went in. On the right there is an exhibition of butterfly species and other beetles from different countries. Well, the spiders/bugs section didn't turn out to be our favorite this time either. They are still scary to me. On the one hand, of course, it's impressive how many kinds and what (and how big) spiders, beetles, scorpions there are in general, but on the other hand, it's scary.
And in the left-hand section of the museum, you can see a live version of some of the larger specimens: scorpions, giant hairy spiders and whatnot.
We walked heroically through this part of the site, but then left rapidly.
Passing over a suspension bridge, there's another spot where two giant macaw parrots are sitting freely. It's signposted to be careful as they can bite, but honestly, they were mostly occupied with each other! So, the other side offers another place where we can find some more tiny and beautiful birds.
With that, we have been around the place. In the gift shop we had a good look around, took some photos because we saw some really nice things, and then unfortunately it turned out that we shouldn't have taken photos. 😔 But it was no problem, a guy was very kind to point it out. And sure enough, there was the sign, but it was such a tiny sign that we honestly didn't notice it.
But never mind because I had already taken a picture of what I wanted to. 😀
And from there we went back for another round of butterflies. (By this time it was getting close to closing time. But what can you do, it's so hard to get away.)
Plus, I didn't say it before, but there are these "showcases" where you can see the different stages of becoming a butterfly, and it was fascinating to watch those larvae moving around, and something had just emerged! This is also a very interesting part!
We walked another 10 or so laps around the butterflies, and then with a heavy heart we said goodbye to this place of wonder.
On the way out, we admired the colorful flowers and took a short walk by the small pond in the park. We also remembered this from 2017 because it's written on the sign that says be careful of alligators…
The water was beautiful, but the thought that an alligator could walk out at any moment or just chill on the shore was not so reassuring.
There's even a game called frisbee golf… Luckily, we didn't see any alligators this time!
After we were well dehydrated and tired, we headed back. We got some drinks at an Aldi and stopped at Chick-fil-A for a sandwich for dinner.
We ate these back at the hotel in the evening.
There are two lakes next to the hotel, but fortunately, there was no alligator warning (of course there still could have been). There were birds instead: egrets, ducks, ducks. One was so brave that it stepped out in front of the cars and made a hasty start towards us. It came quite close. I think I was more frightened than the other way around because it came so confidently. It was funny. And at the other lake we saw a bunch of iguanas.
We had dinner, took a shower. It was a bit of a hassle to unpack the suitcase because we bought a clothes' compactor, you probably know it, and everything was packed very compactly. But it was no use, we had to take things out for one night, and we had to somehow dig out the next day's clothes. But of course, we managed everything.
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