Duke City Diversions - Part I

The Albuquerque Biological Park is made up of three major sections: the relatively new Botanical Gardens and Aquarium, which are co-located a few blocks from Old Town, and the venerable Zoo, a few miles away.

The Botanic Gardens offer quite a diversity of gardens from the formal rose garden to the Mediterranean gardens inside the glass pavilion to the xeriscape gardens. If you are here on a Thursday evening in summer, come for the music by the pond.

For such a small space, the Aquarium has a surprising variety of things to see, from the rays in their shallow pool to the shark tank at the far end of the building. Along the way you can walk "through" a cave inhabited with Moray eels, watch jelly fish and sea horses, and of course, sharks.

The Zoo has the usual zoo inhabitants from elephants to polar bears, as well as a few not so usual inhabitants, like two young white Bengal tigers. Kids can ride a camel, listen to a story teller, or see a bird show that is quite spectacular.

Quick Tips:

We discovered there were NO maps handed out with our tickets and there was no map anywhere to be found on the grounds, so we missed a lot. Signage is limited and the grouping of animals a bit odd, i.e. the polar bears are next to the Mexican Gray Wolves. If you print out a Zoo map on line, be aware that it is interactive (mouse over the numbers to find out what is where), so make sure to list the numbered areas you want to see before you go.

A must at the Botanic Gardens in summer is butterfly pavilion. They should give you a photo brochure when you buy your entrance tickets to help you identify the 40+ species of butterflies flitting around you.

Eat at the Shark Reef Café (you don’t need an entrance ticket if you just want to eat there without seeing the Gardens/Aquarium). The draw is more the experience than the food, after all, where else can you dine with the sharks, barracuda, and sea turtles swimming past your table – in the desert yet!

Best Way To Get Around:

You will need a car to get around and if you are here in summer, sunscreen, hat and water are a must. You can buy water in the restaurants, but it is expensive. The Zoo and the Gardens are mostly outdoors and require a quite a bit of walking.

When it first opened, this restaurant was touted as the latest in elegant dining. White table clothes, a fancy name – Sebastian’s – and a great menu. However, dining in a room, one wall of which was part of a shark tank, evidently didn’t catch on in this land locked city. Dinners are no longer served here, there are no white cloths on the table, and the menu is more sandwiches, salads, and hamburgers.

But the setting is still fantastic. You can sit and munch on your sandwich while sharks, barracuda, tuna (which was conspicuously missing from the menu), sea turtles, and a myriad of brightly colored fish swim past your table.

There are downsides to this restaurant. Since it’s a big draw for school kids, and parents with kids, we had the unpleasant experience of screaming babies, but the food is good, though not outstanding. I had the chicken piñon salad which was good. My husband, thought the huevos rancheros were great.

If you just want to lunch with the sharks, you can get into the restaurant without paying an entrance fee to for the Aquarium/Botanic Gardens. There is also a take out hamburger place with outside tables across the patio from the Shark Reef Café.

Across the lobby is the gift shop, and which the theme is nautical and fish related, there is little that actually has anything to do with the exhibits inside. There were no brochures on the fish on display, no books on sharks, rays, jelly fish or anything else in the aquarium.

Of all the spots to eat in the Zoo, this is probably the nicest. It’s a beautiful pink adobe building set at the edge of a wide grassy park a shaded with ancient cottonwoods and a duck pond – with ducks, geese, swans and koi. All the food is served cafeteria style, which is probably just as well when the zoo is busy. The inside eating area, where you can dine in air conditioned comfort, is quite small and noisy, so we decided on the patio and were rewarded by a visit from a local peacock wandering through the zoo.

The food is good, if limited – the menu is mostly hamburgers, burritos, chips from a bag, pre-made salads and assorted soft drinks etc. It’s also rather expensive. We bought two bottles of water and split a bean burrito plate which came with beans (guess you can’t have too much of a good thing) and Spanish rice for $7.50.

While you can’t bring your own food into any of the buildings, we did see several people who had the right idea, they’d spread blankets on the grass under the trees and ate picnic lunches.

There are other spots in the Zoo to find food. The Lobo Café, which is near the entrance, also serves a similar menu to the Cottonwood Café, though it was closed when we were there, and throughout the park there are carts selling snacks – ice cream, popcorn, soft drinks and the like.

My husband and I came to the Botanic Gardens to get ideas for our xeriscape projects in the back yard and kept getting side-tracked by all the other gardens and such around the Festival Green.

For instance the dragon! He guards the entrance to the Children’s Fantasy Garden. If you are traveling with kids, or like me, never quite grew up, this is a must. Walk through the underground tunnel, bristling with roots and earthworms the size of pythons and exit into a world where pinecones are six feet long, bumble bees are the size of eagles and watering cans are big enough to live in. Though the Children’s Garden has been open nearly a year, they were still working on it when we were there, laying down more walkways that look like fossil beds – though I suspect the dinosaur foot prints were made by the dragon!

Back in the real world there is also a hint of whimsy. Just a dragon’s breath away from the Children’s garden is the ornate Rosalie Doolittle Fountain, a maze of shiny tile and bubbling water built to honor the guru of southwest gardening and a driving force behind the creation of the Gardens.

The entire center area is a large lawn called the Festival Green, shaded by ancient cottonwoods. Along one side a model railroad meanders through villages, across tressles, and mountain passes. Across the Green, next to the pond are the two conservatories. The larger of the two is a two-story Mediterranean garden, the other the plants of the desert, which in summer, is opened to the warm desert air. This garden continues to spill out into the back of the conservatory. Here, if you have an interest in herbs, both for cooking and healing, you will find the curandera (wise woman, healer, witch – take your pick) garden.

At the far side of the pond is an odd shaped building with screens instead of walls. This is the Butterfly Pavilion and inside, every inch of the area around the paths inside is covered in flowers and the air filled with something like 40 species of butterflies. This is an absolute don’t miss. It is open only in the warm months and if you can, try to imagine hundreds of butterflies flitting around you as you walk down the paths. Truly magnificent.

The Aquarium is entrancing. The shallows greet you, with the rays "flying" beneath the waves that wash up on a sandy beach where the shore birds walk. Then, into eel caves where the toothy grins of Moray eels menace from the depths. In one darkened room, lighted windows open onto the world of sea horses and umbrella jelly fish no bigger than a dime. In the center of the room is a column of water filled with larger, ethereal jelly fish. There are more educational bits as well, the reefs, natural and man-made, with brightly colored fish swimming among the coral, and an exhibit on the junk that has been dumped into the ocean and the damage it has done to the fish population. Outside, beside the old shrimp boat, swim half a dozen pelicans in the tiny "harbor."

The main attraction, however, is the "Open Ocean" exhibit, the 285,000 tank filled with a variety of sharks, barracuda, tuna, sea turtles, parrot fish, and a hundreds of schooling fish who swim around a coral reef. The effect is impressive. When you walk into the darkened room, it has the effect of a wall of water from floor to ceiling, teeming with fish. The plexiglass wall is so transparent, I have run into to it several times. This, the largest room, also has a bank of padded stairs to sit on, rather like stadium seating, and it is usually filled with people just watching the fish, which is something I could do for hours. The sleek, powerful movement of the sharks is positively hypnotic.

If you want a longer look in more comfortable surroundings, you can have lunch at the Shark Reef Café and watch the fish from the other side of the tank.

I’m told this zoo is only one of two zoos in the States (the other being San Diego) with Koalas! And, in the feline department, the zoo can boast two white Bengal tigers. Most of the animals are in a "natural" environment and there is quite a bit of renovation going at the moment: a new home for the Mexican Gray Wolves is under construction, as is a large area called Adventure Africa.

We arrived early to beat the summer heat and the crowds, something I heartily recommend. Being without a map (see introduction), we wandered a bit before the 10:30 feeding at the Seal Pond. Past the flamingos, standing so still in their shaded pool, looking like their plastic lawn counterparts, we found our way from the hot dry southwest to the steamy heat of Tropical America, an enclosed rain forest exhibit amid a Mayan ruin. The jungle creatures here were all small, from the spider monkeys to the tiny tree boa curled up on a branch inside a hollow tree trunk complete with viewing window, though the little tamarin monkeys from Colombia seemed to be the favorite with the kids.

Feed the seals was not so much a show, as the keepers feeding the seals while a Zoo Guide gives a short talk about seals and sea lions, their habitat, habits, and personalities. Nevertheless, just being themselves, the seals put on quite a show, edging each other out for a bit of lunch or catching fish in mid-air.

Off to the Cat Walk, which we timed just right, since the keepers were setting out food and piñatas for the cats (yes those little papier mâché figures you bash with a stick at parties and toys fall all over the place), though the tiger version had bits of meat inside and was sprayed with a "perfume" to entice them to play. The two white tigers, who are still under a year old, sniffed, batted, and poked at their round paper balls. Finally, the young male pounced, the ball broke, and bits of meat flew across the cage. Did he notice? No. Just like a little kid at Christmas, he was more interested in the wrapping.

On our way to lunch we stopped to see the bird show, primarily because I was told that was the only place in the zoo where I would see a Peregrine! All the birds here are those who for one reason or another cannot be released back into the wild. Some are quite humorous, like the vulture that makes his entrance in a low glide over the audience.

The finale is the Peregrine, who won’t be making any spectacular 200 mph dives since some idiot shot him in the wing! He and his trainer make a slow progress through the audience so everyone can see this magnificent creature up close. It’s a show I would highly recommend.

It’s simple, really. The city was named for the Don Francisco Fernandez de la Cueva Enrique, Duke of Alburquerque (Alburquerque (spelled with an extra “r”) is a small town in the Badajoz region of Spain, and in 1706, the year the New Mexican town was founded (a mere century after neighboring Santa Fe), the 10th Duke was also the Viceroy of New Spain. I suspect there was some political currying of favor involved when founding father and governor of New Mexico, Don Francisco Cuervo y Valdes, named the new Villa after the Duke, but then, the governor was not shy either, since he also requested a donation of “bells, ornaments, chalices, missals, images and jewels” for the new church (though whether the Duke complied with the request, I don’t know). The duke’s descendants still make periodic visits to this city on the Rio Grande.