Botanical Gardens

I visited the Saigon Botanical Gardens/Zoo. There was too much zoo and too little botanical gardens to suit my tastes, but it was nice nonetheless. And it fueled my desire to get out of Saigon and see more of the countryside. I'd read that there might be some quantity of animal abuse at the zoo, but I didn't see too much. The elephants had it the worst. Their enclosure was really small for the number of them and they all stood right against the fence and sort of danced the entire time, as if they had been trained to do so.

The botanical garden aspect of this park seems to have been overwhelmed by the zoo, but there were some neat things, like these enormous African Mahogany:

These guys were taking the boat over to this island to feed the gibbons. As they approached one of them shouted and the gibbon took off afraid. Upon closer inspection I realized that the man in blue at the top of the stairs was carrying a slingshot. I'm curious now about how aggressive these gibbons are:

There were also some fairly strange looking bears. All the signs were in Vietnamese, but they are some species or subspecies of the Asiatic Black Bear: