A Look at Some Well-known European Zoos - in 1984

Here ends my zoo travels.
There is one more journal entry: on March 2nd I went to the airport because there was an issue with my flight the next day – I was supposed to be catching a Lufthansa to Johannesburg and connecting to a South African Airways flight to Harare in Zimbabwe where I planned on spending a week before flying Qantas back to Australia.

Although there is no journal entry for March 3rd, I know I was up early and visited the zoo again until just after midday when I returned to the hotel to finish packing. At 15:00 I checked out of the Hotel and headed for the airport. My Lufthansa flight was not due to depart until the evening and I was there in plenty of time but, because I was on standby, I did not get a seat, and was told it was unlikely I would get one for at least another week. Reluctantly, I changed my ticket for a flight back home to Sydney. However, it was now 19:00 and the flight didn’t leave until 06:00 the next morning so I spent the night on a bench in a small lounge in the terminal, clutching my bags while I dozed.

I caught the flight home the next morning without incident.

When I made these notes and wrote the commentary in 1984 I had no idea the information would be of interest this far into the future. Having seen zoos evolve and change direction over the intervening years, when I found these notes storage they reminded me of a point in time that was very different to today. And that my drawing skills are pretty rudimentary.

I hope these notes/views/opinions have been of interest, and sincerely hope that some of the more disappointing zoos have picked up their game since then.



Hix

 

@TeaLovingDave,

I've just fixed the links, and those that aren't visible will be soon once I've posted all the individual reviews.



Hix

 

I like the idea behind this series very much, as it reminds me of my own tours around the zoos of western Europe in the early 1970s.
I messaged Sim a while ago about finding a better way for ZooChat to accommodate posts and discussions about zoo memories, which was prompted by the fact that I had just scanned a number of photos from my first visit to Whipsnade in 1972 and posted them in the Whipsnade gallery, but I was not sure about the best way to combine them with text into a longer post in one of the Forums.

 

I've been looking forward to these reports since you mentioned typing them up years ago Hix, I'm appreciative of your efforts.

And I'm sure I'm not the only one eagerly awaiting your reports GL.

 

I started typing these up several weeks ago, and figured the best way was to have a thread with one post containing an introduction and 17 links to the individual reviews. But I realised some reviews were too tiny as stand alone reviews in their own threads (like Dahlholzli and Berne's Bearpits) and figured they'd have to appear in this thread somehow. Then I found my travel journal/diary, and the inclusion of those entries necessitated a separate post per zoo - and also confirmed for me the order in which I had seen the zoo. I was also very surprised that I had visited Regent's Park too, as I had completely forgotten about it!

I didn't want the flow of the now 21 posts to be interrupted, so I waited until it was 3:00am in Europe to quickly post them all, then took my time posting the individual reviews. That way I could post the links to each each zoo's review. Unfortunately, much of the formatting done in Word was lost when posted, plus there were broken links in each post so I had to go through the thread re-inserting the links and reformatting each time I posted a review.

But, if the information is of interest, then the work will be worth it. I'm just sorry it took nine years from the original Bristol Zoo review to get around to finishing off the rest!



Hix

 

Great to read about your memories of Jersey zoo @Hix !

Very interesting post indeed.