I think it is too small. And the furnishings look very "home aquarium"-ish if you see what I mean. More like there should be a school of tiger barbs or something swimming around in there. I'm not enjoying being so critical of the River Safari when I had such high expectations. Sigh.
The tank is small, and in my opinion, totaly innapropriate for these animals. They are quite sensitive to stress and not easy to keep healthy in captivity. I agree with Chlidonias that some of us might be hitting river safari too hard, but the fact is that the expectations were quite high, and the end result doesn't really match them. To me the birdpark and zoo are much better and make much more sense to exist as such. River safari could (or should?...) have been just an extension of the zoo. I wonder how many people will actually return to it after their first visit...
I agree that river safari looks like it was done in a hurry and that the end result seems to be below what we are used to from the bird park, zoo or night safari. Many tanks seem to have that DIY feel that is really not what one expects from a brand new park that need to match the level of its "older brothers". There also seems to be a lot of quite poorly designed exhibits that end up buffering the positive effect that the (seemingly) few good ones may have, like the Mekong catfsh tank or the giant pandas. Maybe it would have been better thought of as an extension of the Singapore Zoo... I have friends from the UK coming to visit this weekend and I am actually taking them to the bird park and night safari, not river safari....
I believe the inconsistent quality of the exhibits is due in part to the fact that River Safari's development spanned across 3 different WRS CEOs. The short lived CEO Isabella Loh (who blew a million dollars in setup costs and another 3 million dollars in potential revenue when she abruptly cancelled the halloween event at Night Safari in 2011) apparently inflicted quite a bit of damage by ordering budget cuts and design changes to River Safari. This is also why the park was delayed so many times.
I guess you have a point there. All the more reason to make it into a part of the zoo, IMO. I never got the concept of having two days-time zoos (singapore zoo and river safari) door to door... Wasn't WRS concerned about canibalization? The night safari has different working hours and Jurong is a whole different thing, but river safari is just another (slightly disappointing) zoo... Anyway I am not a business expert here But I am curious to see how the other wrs parks may suffer (directly or indirectly) from the opening of river safari... It would be a shame that a bad project somehow affects world-renowned institutions like the other 3 wrs parks... I still prefer Jurong
Many casual visitors already view River Safari as an extension of the Zoo, albeit with a separate admission. So the 2-park combo tickets are popular. An adult combo is $39; if you minus the regular Zoo admission of $22 and $5 tram ride included in the combo, the River Safari works out to a "top-up fee" of $12.
