The Eastern Discovery Tour
Day 5

After the Jungle Mouse I had some time spare so decided to have a look around the zoo. Like Beijing Zoo it isn't up to the standards you get at Western Zoos. They have similar problems with outdated enclosure, including the same problems with the Big Cat and Elephant enclosure.
If I was to visit again I would still want to check out the Aviary and the Bear Mountain section. I would completely avoid the reptile houses and exotic museum. Everything else I would say was optional, unless I wasn't planning to Beijing Zoo, in which case I'd do the Panda as well. Most of the other stuff is something I would do again if I had time, but I wouldn't make any sacrifices (for example there's another park with a roller coaster in Tianjin I missed) to do.

The giant aviary is a great place. It has a huge range of exotic birds that you get to walk among. You can also by bird feed or fish to feed the birds, meaning a lot of them will come up to you.

You might recognise this bird from the HSBC advert. If you buy a bowl of fish it will come right up to you.

If you look carefully you can see a baby hippo sticking it's nose out of the water. The enclosure here wasn't that bad with a pool and outside area, the water though was in a terrible state. Now I accept cleaning the enclosure will be a problem with a protective 2 ton animal in it. I did though see a lot of lumps of poo floating in it. Surely someone could have fished those out with a net.

The park also had elephants and rhinos, although the elephants were showing the same distress through boredom as the ones at Beijing Zoo.

The Exotic Animal House was terrible, and is best avoided. It was mainly reptiles, in pretty plain enclosures, but also had several small monkeys in a small cage on their own. A lot of enclosures (including this marmoset one) also had loads of ants on the ground.

Both zoos I visited had a number of deer and goats on display, as well as a couple of camels.

The staff do a giraffe feeding every day, where you can feed leaves to the giraffes. I'm surprised that bloke didn't get his camera nicked.

Sometimes you the feeling an animal doesn't want it's photo taken.

The monkey houses were about the same as the worst ones in Beijing zoo, although were slightly better lit. The enclosures aren't great, but they had been provided with climbing equipment, and I didn't see any obvious signs of distress.