A rodeo with ostriches

Riding the planet's largest flightless bird is like mounting a bronco

Mounting an ostrich isn't easy.

Staying on is even harder.

Visitors to Zhengzhou's Jinlu Ostrich Amusement Park don't get a saddle or stirrups when they hop on the giant birds' backs.

They can only clasp fistfuls of plumage and pray, as they sway atop the creatures' swiveling shoulders.

Another thing ostriches run.

Fast.

As in up to 70 klometers an hour. Lunging 5 meters each step.

(Makes sense if you can't fly or fight predators like cheetahs. You get great at skedaddling.)

Also ostriches peck.

Hard.

It's no accident African agriculturalists never domesticated the world's largest flightless bird.

Yet the park in Henan's provincial capital is for both pleasure and practicality.

The park began as Asia's largest ostrich-breeding base in 1997 before becoming one of China's weirder amusement destinations, starting in 2004.

They've stunted their gates' velocity by shortening riding tracks.

The scene resembles a rodeo. But in China. With ostriches. (Ostriches and horses also race without riders along racetracks.)

Weird thing is, bucking atop the planet's largest bird like it's a bronco is among the more, um, normal things about the park.

Guests can also visit an outdoor petting zoo with living and pickled animals, an imperial-themed haunted house where dynastic officials hack each other apart and a forest of robotic dinosaurs.

The insane mingling of more than 200 activities many offbeat on their own and even weirder together makes the place crazy fun.

It's a neophile's paradise.

Visitors to the Kiss Animals Petting Zoo can feed and caress bunnies, Chihuahuas and Pekinese.

The adorable critters skitter among jars bobbing with various fauna's preserved fetuses. A dead weasel dangled inside an empty bottle hanging from the caging of the pigeon, pheasant and geese enclosure beneath a peach tree heaving with fruit and red lanterns when we visited.

We fed the birds. Wings blasted toward the chow.

The flurry made the embalmed weasel swing like a pendulum.

Kids found the lifeless creatures more fascinating than frightening. (They're allegedly for educational purposes, though not even labeled.) Tikes afforded them little heed and instead devoted attention of the more animated animals.

A guinea pig colony scuttles through an underworld beneath the petting zoo. Flickers of fur flash between tunnel entrances in pits exposing intersections.

A nearby archery zone stacks bows and arrows on a table next to bunnies.

Rest assured, the rabbits are for petting. Foam targets are for shooting.

(We asked.)

These are activities to enjoy if you're not zorbing (tumbling downhill or over lakes in transparent balls), bungee jumping or rock-climbing.

Or picking fruit. Or grass-skiing.

Or watching two papier-mache imperial bureaucrats saw a third in half to techno remixes of Eye of the Tiger in Ghost City.

That's the haunted house across from the main kids' area. (Not advisable for children, despite being as corny as the adjacent maize field.)

The play area is slung with rows of kids' hammocks next to two-dozen obstacle courses for adults to cross the river. Some kerplunk into the lilypad-studded waters.

Visitors navigate the park in self-driven electric karts or four-person bicycles. (Of course. How else would you get around such a vast and diverse weird-scape?)

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.

(China Daily Africa Weekly 03/27/2015 page25)