A rodeo with ostriches

An amusement park ride is located in a vegetable garden in Zhengzhou's ostrich park.[Photo by Erik Nilsson/China Daily]

These vehicles will take you to the maze at the terminuses of which you're rewarded with an ostrich egg.

Or to carnival rides in the middle of farm fields that seem to feed employees. Many rides are arms' length from lettuce and onion rows, fenced off with twig trellises.

Such automobiles can take you to Dinosaurs Alive!, where animatronic prehistoric wildlife prowl woodlands.

Allosaurs roar. Stegosaurs whip spiked tales. And brachiosaurs do what they do best - being the tallest land creature ever.

Struthiomimus, the fastest dinosaur, supports otherwise feeble declarations of ostrich lineage. Its Greek name translates as "ostrich mimic".

Perhaps riding the ornithomimid wouldn't be that different from riding an ostrich today.

It's not an unusual thought in such an unusual place.

While the park's claim to fame might seem peculiar - think three national tourism-authority stars vs five on a five-star weirdness scale - the park's bizarreness may ultimately be its claim to fame.

And many of its claims are bizarre.

It dubiously self-declares as Asia's largest dinosaur science facility. (A forest of robo-dinos does not make.)

Signage not only associates ostriches with "terrible lizards" but also with the mythical vermillion bird. The totem, linked with the Chinese goddess Zhuque, is described as a multicolored burning fowl like, yet not, a phoenix.

That connection seems weirder at the dining street - just past murals depicting ostriches soaking their feet in hot buckets next to Snoopy - where their meat is barbequed as chuan'r (kebabs) and their eggs are fried with egg and tomato, (a take on a typical Chinese dish scrambled with chicken eggs).

The other parts of the roughly 3,000 ostriches slaughtered annually are processed into leather accessories, oil and decorative plumes.

Vendors pedal painted ostrich eggs as handicrafts, boiled corncobs and sugar blown into the shapes of dinosaurs.

Maybe none of this seems strange to neophiles, who visit the park to joyride ostriches and discover the whole place is a bird of a peculiar feather.

Yet perhaps it all should.

Novelty-seekers come for the ostriches. They stay for the wilder and weirder ride that is the rest of the park.

 

 

 

 

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