Zoo and River Safari [Singapore 2018]

The reason we went to both the Jurong Bird Park and Night Safari was because they had a deal where you could go to those two parks, plus the zoo and River Safari, for a total of $86. At just over $20 per park, it was a deal we couldn’t pass up. I think we had a week to go to the remaining parks after the bird park and Night Safari, so we picked a day to visit the zoo and River Safari and use up our tickets.

Clockwise from top left: penguins, tiger, zebras, rhino, reptiles

The zoo is a pretty standard zoo. They have a variety of animals including elephants, monkeys, penguins, sea lions, otters, zebras, giraffes, and lions, and tigers, and bats. It’s a decent sized zoo, with enough to see to keep you busy for a least half a day, not so small that you wonder why you paid money to see it, but not so huge that there’s no way you can see everything. Throughout the day, there are also a few shows and animal feedings that you can attend. We saw the sea lion show and the elephant show. The sea lion show was better in terms of what the animal can be trained to do. Sea lions can dive and jump, and walk on their flippers; elephants can . . . open their mouths really wide? Useful in certain circumstances, perhaps, but not as exciting to watch.

Sea lion and elephant shows

After the zoo, we went to the River Safari, which is right next to the zoo. [The zoo, River Safari, and Night Safari are all at the same place, and the bird park will soon be moved to the same location as well.] The River Safari suffers a bit from not quite having its own niche. It’s generally themed around animals that can be found near water, but its main draw is . . . pandas. What I learned from Zoo Tycoon was that besides being very hard to keep happy and reproducing, pandas are highland/mountain animals. So . . . not river creatures. The problem is that any fish at the River Safari can be found at the aquarium, any birds at the bird park, and any other animal at the zoo, leaving the River Safari without a signature animal. Hence the pandas.

Anyway, we saw a variety of fish, birds, monkeys (also not river animals?), manatees, an alligator, and the pandas. The pandas are in their own special exhibit and were being fed when we were there, so we got to see them go through the process of stripping and eating bamboo. And I don’t think I’d gotten to see live pandas before, so that part was worth it. The manatees were also interesting to see. They were in a large tank where they all just kind of slowly float around.

A panda

Overall, the River Safari is the least entertaining/developed of the four animal parks, but if you want to a) see the pandas or b) take advantage of the deal to see all four parks, it’s worth a couple hours to walk through. It’s not a bad park; it’s just not as good as the other three more established parks.