Tuesday 31 January 2006

Singapore Zoo

The weather was nice so we headed out to the Singapore Zoo today; we had been reading review about how great it was. Never a good idea to have your expectations raised. The zoo is in such a lovely location almost fully surrounded by the Upper Seletar Reservoir and surrounding mountains. Sadly they didn’t take advantage of all these lovely water views and the space they had available. Many of the original animal enclosures (like that of Taronga Zoo) were sadly small with the animal pacing back and forth. Some of the newer animal enclosures are very nice. Even though Marika doesn’t like baboons we particularly liked the Hamadryas Baboon enclosure, it was big & open, had many viewing locations and no evident fences other than a moat between the baboons and the people. Mind you some people might have been considered as baboons by their behaviour. They have good variety of big cats, African animals and primates. We gave the Australian animals a miss this time, other than a Blue Tongue lizard that a keeper was walking around with. Next we plan on going to the Night Safari Zoo, which is located right next door to the ‘day zoo’. The Night Zoo is a little larger and sound impressive, but we’re not going to build up our expectations. I would recommend visitors to Singapore visit the zoo if they like animals, go early before it gets to hot. The zoo’s design has made good use of shaded tree coverage and there are special cool rooms and a kid’s area with a water feature they can play in.

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