Pandering at the zoo

Got a thing for giant pandas? Here's a tip. If you're heading to Adelaide Zoo to hang out with your favourite black-and-white beasts, check yourself in a full-length mirror before heading out the door.

At the zoo's entrance, I meet Jill. We're waiting for keepers to collect us for the $495 VIP panda tour, a 1½-hour behind-the-scenes encounter with Funi and Wang Wang in their glamorous digs.

Jill's a hoot, confessing she's been obsessed with pandas since she was a child. It's an obsession that has grown over the decades. Her house in Perth is filled with panda-themed trinkets: teapots and toys, tea towels and oil paintings. She booked a spot on this tour before she booked a hotel room.

It takes a few minutes for me to realise that Jill is also dressed like a panda - in black and white from head to toe. As I'm pondering the sartorial move, panda keepers Matt Daly and Steve McKee usher us inside the enclosure. The first stop, a bamboo-crammed cool room, is anticlimactic. As for Jill, she's positively itching to get out from among the greenery.

We step out and glimpse a flash of black-and-white fur in a cage. No one cares what Matt and Steve are saying any more. Not when there's a panda this close.

The pandas are trained to inch right up to the steel bars, sitting upright, allowing keepers to take their temperature daily and blood samples as required. Funi has also been trained to lie on her side, to get accustomed to having ultrasounds for when the day comes - fingers crossed - that she falls pregnant. Their behaviour is rewarded with food and we take turns feeding them apple slices and "panda cake" - a concoction of corn and rice powders, soy flour, ground bamboo, sugar, eggs and the like. We all let Jill go first. The pandas take the snacks with extremely good manners.

We're not supposed to go near their razor-like claws but I sneak a tiny stroke of a paw. The tour includes a free photograph so a photographer snaps us hand-feeding the animals.

Matt's got a clear favourite. Looking at a poster, I ask if he can tell which panda is which. "Oh yeah, that's Wang Wang," he says pointing at one. "He always has that slightly blank stare. It seems like no one's home but it's an act - there's a lot going on behind that."

Right now both are being adorable in their separate cages - Wang Wang rolling around in a ball while Funi flops out on a high bed - but we can't linger. Our next job is to pop food at spots around their outdoor enclosures so they can head out and hunt it down.

Eventually, we're outside again, with regular zoo-goers watching the pandas track down their brekkie. I ask Jill if the pilgrimage was worth it. "Oh yeah," she says, never tearing her eyes from the pandas as she speaks. "It was totally worth it." That's about as black and white as you can get.