CGSwans flies north for the winter

I'm shamelessly procrastinating from packing up my apartment so I thought I'd make a quick post about some of the resources I've used to plan the trip.

For budgeting purposes I've used the Price of Travel European Backpacker Index, which can be found here: Cheapest cities in Europe in 2017 - 56 major European cities by price It's ordered by US dollar values but I have tended to use euros for the cities that use the euro, pounds for the UK and converted into AUD everywhere else.

I've used this site - which also has less extensive indices for other continents - as a budgeting tool for my US and Japan trips, and I've found that it works well as a base of assumptions, but that I have to allow a bit more for each budget line. I don't like to stay in bargain basement hostels, I tend to spend more on attractions and food but I rarely drink alcohol (and never on my own). What I've found is that if I budget 30% more per day then I come out slightly ahead, allowing for some minor unexpected expenses (I also have a budget for unexpected *major* expenses, but that's a separate thing).

I've made provisional hostel bookings for the entire trip, and my accommodation costs are running at an average of 15% more than the bed prices listed on the Index. For that extra 15% I'm getting small dorms (no more than 6 beds in a room), in mostly high quality hostels. I'm only rarely staying in places with average ratings of below 8/10. So I'm running under budget for accommodation and getting pretty decent places to stay.

Zoo and aquarium visits are a killer cost for attractions, and with my tentative itinerary I'm actually running at about 135% of the Index - slightly over budget - for attractions. I can live with that, both because I'm a bit ahead on accommodation (and transport, which I'll come to later) and because that's just how much it costs. If I need to cut spending I'm going to look to do it on food and accommodation rather than, say, stand outside a major zoo without going in. I use Wikitravel for a brief overview of the major attractions in any given destination, although you should double check the prices listed on the institution's official website. Many of those listed on Wikitravel are out of date, but conversely you can also find online discounts.

Food is a bit of a wildcard, but it's also something that I have a fair amount of flexibility on. I have about 600 meals to eat along the way, as well as caffeine (Coke Zero being my poison of choice) and I'll need to stay well stocked on sugary snacks too. That might be counter-intuitive for those who don't know diabetes, but it cuts both ways: when I'm more active than usual I'm prone to low blood sugar, and there have been days when I was away that I simply couldn't drink Gatorade fast enough to keep going.

But anyway - this is a budget line that could blow out if I get reckless, but about half of my breakfasts are provided for by hostels, and I can eat relatively cheaply from markets and so on too. I'm aiming to buy one vegetarian meal from a cheap restaurant each day. My parsimony with respect to alcohol also gives me some latitude for food, as that is a component of the index that I'll usually not be using at all.

It hints at how much ground I'm seeking to cover that, of the 56 destinations listed, a total of 33 are relevant to my trip. I have some destinations that aren't listed, and for these I've used the nearest city in the same country; a fairly rough and ready substitute, but one that seems to be working. I've budget-mapped the more expensive countries and my known expenses - accommodation, attractions I definitely want to visit and transport costs - are less than two-thirds of my budget. Most reassuring.

For accommodation my preferred site is Booking.com, with Hostelworld as a less-favoured alternative. Booking tends to be a bit more expensive as you get closer to the dates you're looking to book, and I think they tend to have fewer rooms available for any given hostel. But what they have in their favour is much greater flexibility: nearly all Booking.com properties have free cancellation up to a couple of days before check-in. Often the booking is slightly more expensive to maintain the free cancellation, but it's worked out well worth it because I've put provisional bookings in place up to nine months ahead, and jumped on some remarkable savings as a result without sacrificing flexibility until I was ready to book trains or ferries.

Booking.com also has far superior customer service to Hostelworld; I've managed to clear up a couple of little issues through them without any hassle, whereas with Hostelworld at best I've received an email days after the fact. And when you do book on Hostelworld you have to pay a non-refundable deposit; if you pay more for a flexible booking you can get a cancelled deposit back, but only as credit for a future booking, locking you into using Hostelworld again within 12 months.

For inter-city transport I expected, for a long time, to use Eurail passes and budgeted accordingly. Ultimately I recognised that they didn't add up, to the tune of saving thousands of dollars by making my own train, bus and ferry bookings ahead of time. I can see how a Eurail pass would benefit a Zoochatter coming for a short period of time, focusing their trip entirely on zoos and wanting to move rapidly between cities. If you were doing a three week trip to zoos in, say, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland then they might well work for you. But not for me.

It's proven a far better strategy to simply make bookings myself, as and when the services I want to use open. It means I face a high sunk cost should I later choose to re-jig my plans but I don't mind: between my early accommodation and transport bookings I estimate I'm saving somewhere between $6,000 and $10,000. Flexibility is nice, but I'm not paying that much for it.

There are two train websites that don't actually sell tickets but have been indispensable in planning. www.seat61.com/ has a somewhat messy and confusing layout but once I got used to it, it became my go-to source for scoping out major train routes and especially to determine when fares become available. Another great website is railcc, which allows you to plug in two major cities (say, Munich and Stockholm) and not only find available connections but a full breakdown of the timetable, with all scheduled stops listed. This has been hugely helpful in planning my crossings in and out of the Schengen zone, as ideally you want to cross out of the zone before midnight and into it after midnight, so as to preserve precious visa-free days.

My preferred site to make bookings in Western Europe has been trainline.eu, which has most of the major rail providers in the region and sells discount fares at face value, without any mark-ups or handling fees. I've also made some use of Loco2 as well as the official websites of a couple of providers. For bus services I like GoEuro, which features quite a lot of bargain-basement services. For ferry services I've used Direct Ferries to search for options, but I've always booked directly through the ferry line's website, as I've found the prices can be a bit better.

I'll leave it there for now. I've ignored these book shelves long enough. Time to return to the packing.

 

I'd be doing stuff differently in Asia, though I think I'd still have a moderately well-defined structure.

I just ticked over €1000 in train, bus and ferry tickets, which is a scary sort of a milestone.

 

Zoo #1: Dubai Aquarium & Underwater Zoo, United Arab Emirates, 13/03/2017

When I scheduled a three day stopover in Dubai I had great hopes that the new Dubai Safari Park would be open, and that indeed I might be the first Zoochatter to see it. Alas, not to be. So instead it is the afore-mentioned aquarium that kicks off my 2017 grand tour.

I generally hate clunky names for collections, especially those relying on an ampersand in the middle to conjoin two otherwise separate names. It's particularly tautologous here, as what is an underwater zoo other than an aquarium?

DAUZ is split over two sections, within a giant shopping centre - the imaginatively named Dubai Mall - that claims to be the world's biggest. I think it probably was at the time it was built, but may have since lost the mantle; this might be what's motivating the big expansion project that's underway. It does, after all, sit underneath the Burj Khalifa - and 800m, wax candle shaped monstrosity that is by a considerable margin the world's tallest building. And it follows that any shopping centre at the base of the world's biggest building must also be the world's biggest.

If I remember correctly DAUZ came to the 'if bigger is better, then biggest is best' party with the world's largest aquarium window. It is certainly massive, though I don't think it approaches the Georgia Aquarium or the SEA Aquarium in size. I could be wrong because I'm working off memory, which is also subject to perception. As the first two mega-aquaria I visited they perhaps loom larger in my mind. Literally.

Anyway, this ambitious slab of acrylic is the Aquarium's biggest selling point, but is given away for free. You can easily view it without paying for entry, from three different floors of the mall, for which it understandably serves as the focal point. Many tourists were content to gawk from the other side of a barrier intended for the paying guests. 100 dirhams - about $A38 - earned you the right to walk through the tunnel within the tank, but only once; no repeat entries either here or in the Underwater Zoo. I'm guessing that's to discourage parents from dropping their kids at the aquarium while they shop and returning later. But it's a tad annoying.

The tunnel, and the big tank itself, is no doubt exciting for the general public but has nothing much to offer enthusiasts. The fish are the usual collection of sharks and rays - grey nurse sharks, reef sharks, leopard sharks, tawny sharks, wobbegongs, guitarfish, smooth stingrays and eagle rays - mixed in with the usual amorphous mass of big silver schooling fish and the odd reef fish, such as tangs, angelfish and triggerfish. I only spent about five minutes in the tunnel, and the viewing from the main window is hopelessly compromised by the lights from the shops facing it. There are, however, a couple of nice secondary viewing points tucked in at the rear of the tank... facing on to a seafood restaurant, of course.

The Underwater Zoo section is two floors above the shark tunnel; with a separate entrance. The basic 100 dirham ticket includes a behind the scenes tour of the area above the main tank itself, which includes the standard fare such as a lab and breeding tanks for 'Nemos'. The best thing here, though, is a platform built down into the tank from where schooling fish were fed. They swam loops around the platform, which was open at surface level, splashing water onto guests as each breached the surface to snatch a morsel. Somewhat more unusually, the lab room featured a pair of eclectus parrots loose inside; apparently this was where they were being habituated to visitors.

The first floor of the 'Underwater Zoo' is a more or less conventional aquarium with all the standard exhibits: big South American freshwater fish, three reef tanks - one open-topped and quite good - jellies and miscellaneous crustaceans. It's quite heavily themed but manages to do so in a way that doesn't unduly impose on the exhibits, many of which are open-topped and well aqua-sculpted. Imagine a Sea Life Centre done well, with interesting exhibits.

The introductory tank is a serviceable half-tunnel tank for smaller shark species. It also purports to showcase thresher sharks, but these were computer-generated images on a blue background behind the tank, giving the illusion both of far greater depth and the presence of thresher sharks.

More interesting species were a number of ancient lineage freshwater fish, including bichirs, alligator gars and paddlefish. Many smaller tanks featured pet shop standards such as neon tetras and lemon cichlids, but these were all tanks of a very high standard.

The significant semi-aquatic species at the aquarium are a very large saltwater crocodile, named King Croc, and his mate, who is presumably the Queen Croc. They both came from Australia and a sign explained that King Croc had been removed from the wild after settling in a residential area of Cairns in the 1980s. A dozen Humboldt's penguins had a dreary small pool and mock rock land area. A group of seven nutria share with three green iguanas. A solitary small-clawed otter had another average mock rock and small pool room, though this was complete with some branches and what I took to be a water slide. The otter was studiously scent-marking throughout the enclosure so perhaps it rotates with one or more others.

A second, upper level is partly given over to an overhead view of the croc pool; a number of Australian bird species live here including a kookaburra (not seen), a pair of red winged parrots and diamond firetail finches. The latter were a satisfying coincidence; I had missed finding them at Melbourne Zoo on Saturday, and they make my 13th passerine for this year's challenge.

The rest of this floor is made up of the 'UAE Creatures of the Night' (I may have misremembered this name, but I've captured the essence). The highlight of this section are two desert hedgehog perpetual motion machines, screaming around their exhibit at breakneck pace. What they were in such a hurry for I have no idea. There's a number of nice reptile exhibits here, too, but the precinct is let down by an utterly inappropriate exhibit for three barn owls that consisted of netting, surrounded on all sides by little suspension bridges serving as visitor paths. It is too bright, too loud and too exposed.

That howler aside, however, DAUZ is a perfectly decent, if unremarkable aquarium. I wouldn't classify it as a must-visit, but there's enough here to satisfy the discerning Zoochatter.

 

And he's off!

 

Zoo #2: Al Ain Zoo, United Arab Emirates, 14/03/2017

'Tis somewhat a pain
To trek to Al Ain
In order to visit its zoo
But if you have time, then see that you do;
And if you're time poor, then refrain

Ok. I promise not to write any more horrific poetry.

Al Ain is a medium sized city on the border with Oman, about two hours by bus south of Dubai. The bus ride out was an experience. Upon boarding the minibus and taking the first spare seat I was greeted with intense stares from several of the men around me. At first I took them to be stunned by my presence as the only tourist on a service that clearly caters overwhelmingly to locals. Perhaps I was lost, they may have surmised, but if so they weren't going to tell me about it.

Eventually I looked up and saw a sign saying that I'd sat in a 'ladies only' seat. I hurriedly got up - these signs are instructions, not suggestions here - and looked for somewhere else to sit, but found that the first spare seat also appeared to be the only spare seat. Increasingly confused at what I was to do - was I going to have to get off the bus and wait an hour for the next one? - one of the men took pity on me. He folded out the armrest next to him, which wasn't an armrest at all but a seat that, once unfolded, took up the entire width of the aisle. The next man to board the bus then proceeded to unfold the seat in front of mine, and so the bus continued to fill up, leaving me progressively less capable of escape. It further transpired, upon asking my kindly neighbour, that the bus wouldn't leave until all the seats were full. Usually I prefer uncrowded buses, for obvious reasons, but this time it couldn't reach capacity fast enough.

The bus ride, once it finally got going only 20 minutes past its scheduled departure time, was comfortable enough, and I enjoyed my first trip through the desert. Dubai is growing at an exponential rate, and almost all of it is high-density development, so it's quite odd to see high rise buildings interspersed with expanses of sand dunes, the only use for which appears to be paddocks for keeping camels. The bus made an awful groaning sound for most of the trip, that could have been either the driver regularly straying outside his lane onto the raised lane markings, or a problem with the bus's brakes. Neither was overly confidence-inspiring, but I eventually got to Al Ain in one piece.

From the bus station a taxi to the zoo cost around 20 dirhams (about $8 in AUD), but it could have been more if I hadn't gently reminded my driver to turn on his meter. The bus was also 20 dirhams, so my return trip cost about $32 all up. Thankfully the zoo itself is only 30 if you decline any of the bolt-on attractions, which I did, so the entire day was only marginally more expensive than the aquarium the day before. I may have been lucky not to have spent the time and money for nothing, however. My driver - after waiting until we were at the zoo and he could be sure of his fare, asked which day it was (Tuesday) and then said I was lucky it wasn't Wednesday, which is a ladies only day. The zoo website makes no mention of this, if it's actually true.

After arriving at about 12:30 (and asking the taxi driver to return at 5:30, though he didn't show), I turned right out of the exit towards the 'Big Cat Oasis' and the series of enclosures (mostly for lions), that precedes it. These are an essentially identical series of almost exclusively carnivore exhibits, though there is also one for chimpanzees, and a couple have been separated into a total of four massive pens for Nile crocodiles. The ones set out in a line on the map all had neatly manicured grass with a couple of trees, whilst those arranged in a circle were somewhat more rugged looking.

The lions were split into about six groups, all singles and pairs. There are two white tigers, but no normal tigers. One of the lion yards had been redeployed to house a serval, and must be the largest small cat exhibit I've ever seen. Other species in this zone were a jaguar, spotted hyena, puma (unseen, but spotted elsewhere in the zoo) and Arabian wolf (which went unseen both here and at its other exhibit).

The Big Cat Oasis is pretty good for almost everything that lives there, I think, but the chimp enclosure is grossly inadequate. A mostly empty green lawn with a small climbing tower in the middle, the only two chimps I saw were huddled on the ground on the far side of the exhibit, seeking the small sliver of shade from the sun that was available there. Note that I was there just two weeks after the end of winter, and as I walked past the chimps it was a stifling 35 degrees Celsius. They must suffer horribly in summer, when the average daily high is 44 degrees.

The zoo is currently undergoing development on the other side of the Big Cat Oasis, which is mostly not yet open but is shown on the maps handed out st the entrance anyway. With the exception of 'African wolf' (Ethiopian wolf?) the animals shown here are already on display elsewhere in the zoo. There's also a separate ride-through safari area out there, which I didn't pay for as it was a considerable extra cost. The only portion of this new zone that is open is a small complex with Nubian ibex, Arabian tahr and greater flamingoes, which is very well done. Many of the ungulate enclosures for arid-adapted species were very good, in fact, demonstrating that hoofstock, too, can be given complex, attractive exhibits that replicate the appearance of the wild.

I suspect the development is at least partly a defensive move against the imminent arrival of Dubai Safari Park. The zoo was almost empty for most of the afternoon, and many of those there were clearly foreign tourists. I presume they arrived on a tour bus because they certainly weren't on my bus-ride-turned-cultural-experience. Either way, the new zoo is likely to cut savagely into Al Ain's share of this market and might even be an existential threat. I don't know.

If you look at the map you'll see the central part of the zoo is made up of a lot of small-looking exhibits labelled for primates and medium sized carnivores. Many of these are the exact same construction, with a large mesh cage, covered by a sail cloth to protect against the sun and with a concrete night house making up one wall. When I say exact, I mean exact. The proportions are the same. The materials the same. At first I found it a pleasing aesthetic, despite the mesh being not much good for photos, but it grew monotonous quite quickly.

There is a smattering of different designs in the same zone, including a number of open-topped pits (meerkats, banded mongooses and spiny-tailed lizards (not seen), and glass fronted exhibits for a caracal, a lovely big red-eared terrapin pool and an Arabian sand cat. The latter was prowling about its exhibit quite openly, which was an improvement on my terrible luck with Tsushima leopard cats in Japan.

The reptile house is a very large, but rather dark and dingy building housing mostly reptiles that are commonly kept in private hands in the West, including carpet, ball and reticulate pythons, anacondas, Amazon tree boas and boa constrictors, corn snakes, green iguanas, desert monitors and various tortoises. There are also a small number of rarer, more interesting species (Sudan plated lizard, Schokari sand racer, diadem snake) but the reptile house is mostly a missed opportunity. There's also a crested porcupine in an eerily green-lit exhibit, which I'm guessing is an interloper from the nocturnal house, which is still featured on the map but was closed, and I suspect has been for some time.

The modest bird collection is distributed across the zoo, including in an enormous bird of prey aviary housing a steppe eagle and secretary bird (I saw just one of each but there may have been more), two adjoining walk-through aviaries for large water birds (pelicans, storks and so forth) that are labelled on the map as the 'bridge aviary', the odd species-specific aviary or yard here and there and the Bird House. I'd expected this to be a building with a variety of habitat or species aviaries, in the manner of Bronx's bird House, for example. Instead the vast majority of the *huge* building was a single walk-through flight aviary. It's nice enough, but it's under-utilised with a collection of about a dozen species of small parrots, doves, starlings, thick-knees, bustards and chukar partridges. I had thought I might do well for the passerine challenge here, but unfortunately netted just three species. The only other exhibit here is a Happy Feet-style concrete and glass room for a flock of Humboldt's penguins.

I might wind it up there - I've not mentioned everything, but I've covered the most important bases. Al Ain is not a great zoo, but it's not a bad one either. It would not be considered out of place in a major Western city, but the relative simplicity and production line design of the exhibits would hold it back from being considered a significant collection in Europe or North America. If you visit I recommend allowing four hours, and also to arrive somewhat later than I did; the best of the day really dropped away at about 3:30, and I noticed more and more local Al Ain residents turning up between then and when I left at 5:30. The zoo was open until 8PM; late hours like this are fairly standard for attractions in the UAE.

That's the second and last of my UAE visits for now. I briefly entertained the notion of going to Arabia's Wildlife Centre in Sharjah after TeaLovingDave inadvertently placed it on my radar last week, but unfortunately there is no public transport option available, and the cost of getting taxis each way wasn't justified by the relatively modest species list; I chose Al Ain instead as it looked like a bigger day out, though I do regret missing out on AWC.

I hit Europe itself tomorrow, and I'll be staying until late September.

 

Glad you're having fun - looking forward to the European zoos!

'African Wolf' is probably Canis anthus (i.e. the population formerly thought of as Golden Jackals, then as African (Grey) Wolves, and now as likely their own thing: African Wolf at Rheine, 03/06/12 | ZooChat ) - the few that came into Europe came from the UAE.

 

More poetry please!

I had a similar experience standing in the women only area on the bus in Jakarta. Lots of stares but everyone was too polite to say anything. When you're in a non-Western country working out what kind of stare you are receiving can be tricky!

 

Sounds cool. Lucky they have late hours i wish major zoos in America would do that.

 

Well you might well pull it off, given that all the really big negotiations in the Middle East are conducted over tea.

 

Zoo #3: Aquario Vasco da Gama, Portugal, 17/03/2017.

A very brief review today for one of the smallest establishments I anticipate visiting on this trip. I don't intend on visiting every aquarium in every city I go to, and obviously the main drawcard here in Lisbon isn't Vasco da Gama, but I had a little time after visiting Belem and I was keen to see a historic, century-old aquarium.

I only stayed about 45 minutes, and that was enough to work my way around twice. The upper level of the building is a museum consisting of taxonomic specimens and models of marine creatures. It's ok, but not really my thing. I anticipate visiting maybe four or five really top tier natural history museums along the trip, but I don't get much into stuffed animals unless they are really displayed well, such as the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History.

The aquarium itself consists almost entirely of small to medium size tanks with at most five or six species in each. There's only a couple that would exceed 1000 litres in size. In the first corridor there's a series of small tanks for inverts such as sea fans and shrimp, followed by a series of four tanks featuring mostly large reef fish - angelfish, tangs, moray eels, lionfish, triggerfish, a cleaner wrasse and a maroon clownfish. They've resisted the urge to over-stock their small tanks, which is pleasing. There's also a number of little hexagonal tanks representing freshwater habitats around the world, such as 'African rivers', and a specimen of a giant squid that was caught in the 1970s.

The next room has the two most interesting species I saw - ornate bichir and Siberian sturgeon (obviously juveniles, I don't know what the plan will be as they grow), in amongst a number of other habitat tanks. Unfortunately it also has the most inappropriate enclosure currently in use; the centre of the room is taken up by an open-topped pool, perhaps a metre deep and six metres long, for a loggerhead turtle. The turtle should be found an alternative home, and the pool could perhaps then be repurposed into a touch pool for small rays and sharks, for which it would be quite decent.

Then there is a room for marine fauna of Portugal. None of the signage was in English - for which I have no complaints, they have no obligation to cater to my monolingual ignorance - so it was hard to know what I was looking at, and consequentially I moved through here a lot faster than I otherwise would. I did pick up, though, that in addition to continental Portugal it features tanks for Madeira and the Azores, so I imagine there's some rare-in-captivity species here for those who seek them out.

The final two rooms consisted of one with a couple of tanks (including the only reef tank, and one for piranhas), as well as a currently empty, joined pair of two minuscule pools labelled for South African sea lion. However I was able to decipher a sign enough to see that the sea lion had died in November and they were seeking a 'suitable replacement'. That suitable replacement would not be a pinniped, but otters would work ok and would still provide the aquarium with a mammalian exhibit. An adjunct off this hall houses a number of amphibian tanks, the most interesting of which for me were rubber eels - I don't recall having seen caecilians before.

Is this place a must visit? No. But for only €5 it was an interesting enough step back into zoo history. As an aside I'd love to see an exhibit, for instance, showing how early life support systems for 19th century aquaria worked. But it really is best thought of as an aquarium 'living museum'.

 

A very reasonable sum-up of the place. The two areas with the most interest for the species-nerd were the amphibian room and the native marine inverts, as I recall - a display of sea pens was a first for me. They had two fur seals when I was there and I can't be too sad that they don't any more!

 

I imagine this might not be on your itinerary, but the Natural History Museum in Helsinki is really wonderful, even though it's on the small size.

 

I will be writing shorter posts than I've done up to now, as I'm beginning to traverse territory that is well-frequented by Zoochatters, and that makes detailed reviews quite redundant. So I will stick to some general impressions.

Zoo #4 - Lisbon Zoo, Portugal, 18/03/2017

I enjoyed a leisurely four hour visit here. It's a rambling, ramshackle, romantic throwback of a zoo, and felt like a taste of what I imagine most urban zoos were like in the 1960s and 1970s. That's not to say I think it's a bad zoo - for the most part it's perfectly good enough, though there are some rough edges to sand off too.

This is very much an ABCs zoo: it has all the headlining big mammals, except giant pandas (watch this space? I wouldn't be surprised if that happened in the future), right down to dolphins, as well as koalas as a second exciting-to-Europeans-though-I-just-don't-get-it-myself species.

But what struck me more than the completeness of the drawcards roster was the sheer number of big mammals: at least 17 chimpanzees, 13 lions, 9 giraffes, 6 elephants, 6 rhinos, 10 Cape buffalo, 7 bison, 6 bears, 4 tigers, 8 cheetahs, 3 leopards, 5 orangutans, 5 gorillas, 5 zebras, 2 hippos and at least 20, probably 30 large antelopes of various species. I recognise that some of these numbers will be inflated by recent breeding (I believe this must be the case with the cheetahs and bears in particular), but it was still quite something to behold.

For the most part small mammals were nowhere near as prominent - I think red pandas, meerkats, raccoons, Iberian lynx and an ocelot were the entirety of the small carnivores on display. The meerkats, as an aside, have full access to the bull elephant enclosure - not a mix I expected! Other smaller species included the Chinese muntjacs and koalas, but for the most part bigger is the name of the game here.

The exception to that is the excellent primate collection - I kick off my European challenge account with no fewer than 28 species. These are for the most part kept in decent, but unspectacular exhibits, but I adored a complex of callitrichid enclosures that were behind a water moat, allowing for open air viewing into their exhibits. I don't recall ever having seen such species without glass or wire intervening. It was an innovative, but low cost way of greatly improving the exhibits, which were also very well planted. The great apes were in an evidently quite new complex but I thought the gorillas and chimps should change sides, as the gorillas had considerably more in the way of climbing opportunities.

The reptile house was another disappointment to follow Al-Ain, again mostly featuring pet shop standards with a skew towards large constrictors, in pretty ugly exhibits. Komodo dragons and Gilda monsters were the only venomous reptiles that I recall.

Much of the bird collection is held in a series of small, dated aviaries within the one area of the zoo, each for just a couple of species. Again, this was a throwback and this time to something I dimly remember from my own childhood: Melbourne Zoo's old banks of aviaries, many for parrots, that were bulldozed to make way for what is now the elephant exhibit. I enjoyed seeing the aviaries at Lisbon, but I can see why this style of display has gone out of vogue. Some of the aviaries were dreadfully small, and the collection should be rationalised slightly to allow aviaries to be combined together and create more space. This is mostly a standard collection of 'showy' birds - lots of parrots, pigeons and pheasants, along with flamingoes, turacos, hornbills, penguins, pelicans, ratites, and the like. However, I did manage to net another three passerines for the challenge.

A surprising highlight was the cable car ride. This is not only free but goes over an enormous portion of the zoo, include parts of display at the top of the site and many different enclosures, in a big triangular loop. And as an added bonus for somebody from an overly litigation-conscious country, it was completely open, rather than being locked inside a glass box like at Taronga. Though expect that to change if anybody takes a tumble, I guess.

All in all I think Lisbon is a decent zoo, albeit a no-frills one with some big flaws. However there is one thing I need to be quite critical of. The hamadryas baboons have a traditional cage-style enclosure with large gauge wire. When I went past an infant baboon was outside the cage, climbing a tree in the garden. Now, as far as escapes go this was pretty innocuous, but it was potentially dangerous for the baboon, not least because it was quite close to a leopard exhibit, which I suspect it could have gotten into as easily as it got out of its own cage.

I took a couple of photos and then raced off to find a keeper before the baboon gottoo far, only to be told they knew about it and it was 'no problem'. Really?

 

1. Are you going to visit the Oceanarium in Lisbon and 2. did you see the Black-faced Impala.

 

So did not you see the okapis, I think there are two male okapis at Lisbon? Because you don't mention them.

 

Sorry, yes, I saw one okapi. Simply forgot to list it, along with two domestic Bactrian camels.

 

I think open callitrichid exhibits are quite common in Europe, so that's something to look forward to.