The 2 Aardvarks Aardventure

This week, 2 Aardvarks went on tour to Arnhem, Netherlands, to celebrate National Aardvark Day…

Not many people celebrate National Aardvark Day, but with a name like 2 Aardvarks, how could we resist this excuse to drive through England, France, Belgum and Holland to Europe’s ‘aardvark capital’ in Arnhem. With rabbit like ears, and a pig-like snout, aardvarks have an incredible sense of smell and hearing. They sleep a lot, but at night time they snuffle about looking for termites, eating up to 50,000 of them each night!

Arnhem is home to the sculpture ‘Feestaardvarken’ (meaning party aardvark). This is a 30m long concrete sculpture of a sleeping aardvark with a yellow party hat. Feestaardvarken has her own twitter account (@feestaardvarken), so we can only assume that she wakes up at night like other aardvarks! Watch the video below of how the piece by artist Florentijn Hofman was made. Hofman is the same artist that conceived the giant yellow rubber duck that has toured harbours around the world, and the wooden hippo that lived on the River Thames in London in 2014 (www.florentijnhofman.nl).

The sculpture was commissoned by Arnhem’s Burgers’ Zoo in 2013 to celebrate their 100th anniversary. Burgers’ Zoo loves aardvarks – their pen is signposted from all parts of the zoo and their photo even appears on the tickets.

Of course, when we visited the zoo, the aardvarks were asleep. One of them was sleeping on his back, just like Feestaardvarken. No party hat though!

So that was National Aardvark Day 2015. A 2 Aardvarks Aardventure!