I'm sorry for your loss. But I'm not sure there's any point to the two of us 'continuing'. You are of course under no obligation to read further.
If the worst thing CGSwans had to say about the UK (and unfortunate accoutrements) was on this level I would consider myself lucky. I can't tell you how to think of course. If you want to take the high road, you should probably avoid such a charged expression. Otherwise you will come across as deliberately antagonistic, which, for someone who is so eager to avoid rude dismissiveness, would be quite ironic I think. For the record, to many outsiders, Germany's engagement with its past represents one of the great societal achievements of recent history. CGSwans will speak for himself, but I know him a little and I can assure you that was no throw-away line but instead high praise.
I see nothing "charged", antagonistic nor ironic in this expression. Thanks CGSwans for your courtesy.
If you are genuinely unaware of the origin of 'kowtow' then you have my apologies. It is easy to forget that for many people on the site English is not a first language.
CGSwans Flies North for the Winter won the title of thread of the year for 2017! Congratulations! Maybe now you'll finally finish the Golden Swans.
Thankyou both, and to all who voted for this thread. 'Tis rather humbling when I look at the quality of the other threads: I am adamant that I have FunkyGibbon covered only for quantity, rather than quality. And Batto and Lintworm in their respective ways created original threads of a type I will never manage. Not sure I'm cool or creative enough to cut it in the never-ending story. As for the Golden Swans - the notes are there, but it's a little way down the list of writer's-blocked to-dos. It'll get done eventually.
Alright, it's not the Golden Swans but I summoned a little energy for another part of the thread cleaning-up job instead. I once entertained notions of ranking all the zoos I visited (with the usual disclaimers about personal opinions and so on), but decided it would be too hard. The top and the bottom of the list would be easy, but there's a big mass of collections in the middle that are too hard to separate. I've decided to go for my top 15, which are pretty easy to settle on as a group, but still tough to put in order. But here goes. Zoos 15-11 are below, with 10-1 to come whenever they're written. 15. Beauval Zoo. This might be controversial, and it's certainly surprising, but Beauval only barely makes the cut. I'd expected Beauval to be well inside the top five, and in fact I had it as my favourite to come out on top. There were good reasons for thinking as much: it has an enormous collection that features what must be as close to a full set of charismatic megafauna as exists in one place, it's a relatively new site and it's clearly got money to burn. But despite it all Beauval manages to feel like less than the sum of its parts: it has a lot of pleasant enclosures - including an implausibly green Savannah - but nothing that's truly outstanding, and the exhibits in the central part of the zoo are so tightly packed together, with so many visitors crowding around them, that I felt a little harried. The extraordinary bird show is worth a visit on its own, but don't do what I did and attempt a day trip from Paris. If I ever make it back it'll be part of a longer trip through the Loire and central France, taking in the arguably more interesting Vallee des Singes and La Flèche, and the inarguably more interesting Doue-la-Fontaine and Besancon. 14. Zoo Leipzig. Quite a bit of what I've said about Beauval could be applied to Leipzig too. Like Beauval I thought Leipzig was a genuine contender for top five, but the zoo I found on the day was a mild disappointment. It has the look and feel of an American cuckoo in the European zoo nest, with exhibits such as the snow leopards and African Savannah that are glossy, but a little characterless. The quandary is best exemplified by Gondwanaland, which is bigger and probably more expensive than Masaola or Burgers Bush, but lacks Masaola's technical mastery or Bush's charm. It was clear within a couple of hours that it wasn't going to be in my top five, and as expected it got pushed out of the top ten by a steady stream of less polished, but purer zoos that came after it. But having said all of that, it's a zoo that has gone up in my esteem in the months since visiting. It was a cold and dreary day when I was there, and so I didn't catch Leipzig at its best (nor, to be fair, did it catch me at my best: I was in a dreary mood too). Pongoland is a magnificent complex, but while I enjoyed being in the indoors section with all four species present - straight-laced gorillas, intellectually detached orangutans, easy-going bonobos and maniacal chimpanzees - I feel I needed to see the outdoor exhibits in use to fully appreciate it all. Leipzig will win a return visit one day, as I hope to return for a Central European swing running from Berlin to Budapest, taking in zoos I missed in Magdeburg, Augsburg, Salzburg and Dresdenburg, but incorporating a few heavy-hitters worthy of revisiting as well. Hopefully we meet again in better circumstances. 13. Plzen Zoo. Now here's one I didn't expect to have land this high. Plzen made my itinerary due to its legendary collection of... well, just about everything. I also knew that the management are unusually welcoming to zoo nerds, though nothing quite prepared for me for Tomas's generosity with his time, which remains one of the highlights of my trip (and one of the relative few zoo stories that made its way into my travel blog). So I was a little surprised to find a zoo that combines a raffish charm with some genuine world class elements, including an extraordinary bear exhibit that takes up one entire side of the park, a picturesque Savannah, literally dozens of planted aviaries and a lemur walk-through whose means of containment I can only speculate at. It's a little rough-hewn in parts, but that only adds to the appeal. It's a remarkable achievement for a zoo that was a provincial backwater barely 20 years ago. 12. Tiergarten Schonbrunn. Another slider, relative to expectations. I must confess to having gilded the lily a little when posting about Vienna. Between visiting Zurich and Vienna I decided I'd try to do a summary post, like this one, of the best of the best. Unfortunately I'd already ventured to say that Zurich might be the best zoo I'd ever seen up to that time (is it? Wait and see), so to maintain some level of mystery I had to at least whisper that other zoos could yet overtake it. So I took my genuine delight with Vienna and hinted that it might have surpassed Zurich, which was never a serious prospect, but that's taking nothing away from a zoo that lives as well in its 255 year old skin as Vienna does. The old paddocks surrounding the rotunda are a legacy to be made the best of, and Vienna makes the best of it. There are some wonderful exhibits among the more recent additions, most notably for the bears. I admit I might have fallen for the indoors exhibits a little harder than I should, simply because I'd given up hope of seeing them, but they are truly lovely even after taking off the rose-tinted glasses. Maybe not the top five zoo I expected (I was pretty bad at picking my top five in advance), but I'd visit again in a heartbeat. 11. Cologne Zoo. Consistent. Dependable. High quality. They're words that you might associate with German engineering, and for the most part (bears being an unfortunate exception), they apply to Cologne very well. I got off to a wonderful start with Cologne's aquatic and reptile house, which houses a gorgeous collection of chunks of living forest that have been carefully removed from the wild and re-assembled, in original form, in glass tanks back at the zoo. Or so they seem. I've been to reptile houses that are more stunningly beautiful than Cologne's, but it has an earthiness to it that I'm not sure is matched elsewhere. The rest of the zoo is persistently gratifying (apart from the afore-mentioned bears, which cop a second mention only because they are so far below the general standard), but it perhaps suffers by inclusion in a long, sprawling tour like mine. It has a wonderful elephant park, but I felt it falls second behind Zurich. It was winning the race for best 'spotted cat' exhibit in my stalled-but-not-yet-over Golden Swans, until pipped by Chester at the last minute. There's another couple of examples of that still to come, and that's why Cologne falls just short of being in my absolute best of the European best.
I'd be interested in hearing your bottom five, in the fullness of time Yep, that is pretty much identical to my sentiment regarding much of Leipzig, as can be seen if one re-reads my 2014 trip report that said, like yourself I would be amenable to a revisit to see how my sentiments may change.
I should have mentioned that I'm confining my list to what I'll call conventional zoos, and leaving out specialist collections. In their own right Apenheul, Walsrode and Oceanografic all could have made this list, but I didn't feel there was enough comparability with them for it to make sense. Here's 7-10. Yep, I'm going to milk this for four posts, not three. 10. Frankfurt Zoo. This one bolted up the list, much higher than I expected it to be before my trip, and perhaps higher with a few months' hindsight than it would have been straight after getting home. The bear, big cat and great ape exhibits all stand comfortably in the company of many zoos with much more space to work with. The rest of the large animal exhibits tend towards being pleasant without being noteworthy, but there's very little to actively gripe about (perhaps the monkey house). The bird house is under-utilised and the reptile collection is good but in slightly tired surrounds, but their modesty is more than compensated for by the Grzimek House, which is surely all anybody could want in a nocturnal and small mammal house. When I compare it with zoos of a broadly similar size and vintage, such as Antwerp, Basel, Amsterdam and London - it fully earns its spot in the top ten. It's a cut above the rest. 9. Nuremberg Zoo. The biggest bolter of them all. Zoochatters who are more fixated on what the species is than how it's displayed might scratch their heads at this selection, but I am most of all a zoo aesthete, and Nuremberg is an aesthetic triumph. The recipe is simple - space and nature - and they turn a fairly generic ABC collection into one of the best zoos in the continent. I have never been anywhere that treats small carnivores so well as Nuremberg, where polecats have as much space as some zoos offer to tigers. Nuremberg leverages its natural setting to display temperate hoofstock species to near perfection, too. If Nuremberg took the standards of display it has for the bulk of its mammals and fleshed out its collection with more than token numbers of birds and reptiles I'd be hard-pressed to keep it out of the top five. An undervalued delight. 8. Rotterdam Zoo. Up until now settling the top 15 wasn't difficult. The top four wasn't a big challenge, and while I wrestled with the order of nine to 15 a little, that's as nothing to how hard it was to settle on five to eight. Rotterdam comes in at the bottom of that list not because I didn't enjoy my day there, which was very much not the zoo's fault. Rather, it's because it doesn't *quite* have the patina of the three zoos that precede it. The aesthetic of Rotterdam is similar to that at Leipzig and Beauval, which I suspect would prevent me from truly loving it even on a return visit. These are zoos that are technically excellent, but less soulful and more over-produced than their peers in this list. Perhaps you'll understand best what holds me back when I say that I was disappointed by the Oceanium complex. Having said that, Rotterdam is a full cut above the others, and it makes its way this high into the list by having a handful of exhibits that are best in class - I've already acknowledged the okapi complex, and there are a couple of others to come - and even when it falls short of the very best it's often not far off. 7. Berlin Tierpark. I wasn't really sure what to expect of the behemoth of Berlin. I knew that it enjoyed a special place in the hearts of some of our European brethren, and that it was famous as much for its bucolic sprawl as the encyclopaedic collection. But I also knew that much of it dates from the 1950s and '60s, a zoo design period that I'm not particularly fond of. Some of those reservations remain - I cannot share the affection for the Alfred Brehm House - but for the most part the Tierpark was an unexpected delight. It's the European zoo that reminds me most of Dubbo, a major zoo in Australia that is at once a delight, but also so remote from anywhere you'd actually want to visit that I've only ever been once, nearly nine years ago. They share a design aesthetic that emphasises open space, with enormous paddocks (in some cases: the big cats miss out, without good reason) bordered by moats and ha-has that are at once simple and utterly divine. ABH aside, if I were to give a knock to the Tierpark it's that it might even be *too* big: I'm a firm believer that any zoo should be doable for a regular visitor in a single day, and even though I'm not a great lingerer at most exhibits I really had to rush at the end to fit it all in. Getting utterly lost in the centre of the zoo didn't help, admittedly. PS: the buffet is the best I've ever sampled at a zoo, and has some exquisite aquaria into the bargain. Eat there.
I've spent some time thinking about this, because the first (or rather last) four are quite easy. Leningrad, Sofia, Bratislava and Madrid, in that order. After that the discussion turns to a slate of zoos that aren't inherently 'bad' but which suffer from my decision to include them in a trip such as mine, such as Ljubljana, Kraków and Rome. Then there are zoos that I felt were disappointing (sorry, guys, Hamburg makes this list, as do the decidedly whelming Valencia, Budapest and Moscow). But if I had to pick a fifth, I'm mildly surprised to say that it's Paris Vincennes. I didn't mind it over much at the time, but as I visited virtually all of the upper tier zoos after it (except maybe Beauval? I can't be bothered checking back), it has greatly suffered by retrospective comparison. It's not a 'bad' zoo in the way that the four I mentioned earlier are, but given how new it is it feels like a massively lost opportunity, especially in such a global city as Paris.
As it happens I shall be visiting Rotterdam in a week (with visits to Cologne and Frankfurt to follow in April, in terms of collections cited in your top 15 thus far) so I shall be interested to see how my feelings compare to yours
Interesting to hear that you actually managed to complete Tierpark in one day, even if you did have to rush to fit it all in! I really need to plan a second trip at some point to finish off seeing the parts of the park that I didn’t manage to reach first time. I would definitely agree that Leningrad Zoo is the poorest I have ever visited in Europe. Although I quite liked Madrid on the whole, I fully appreciate that the standards of many of their enclosures are very much substandard.
This actually surprised me a lot, as I was very pleasantly surprised by this zoo when visiting last summer. Except for the walkthrough aviary with it's weird ugly walls, and the overly reflective glass present throughout the whole zoo, I actually find it hard to fault this zoo for much at all... I definitely liked the architecture style of all buildings and aviaries a lot, and even the excessive use of mock rock didn't bother me that much... Perhaps we have such radically different views because I visited in the summer? I can imagine the zoo would look barren without most of the plants...
As I said, I surprised myself a little, and to be clear I'm grading partly on wasted potential. It isn't often that you see a new zoo built essentially from the ground up, and it's even rarer for it to happen in a city with the economic power, population and tourist numbers of Paris. It should have been an instant heavyweight, but it's nowhere near that. A similar sense of a moment missed puts Valencia in the same discussion, and the curve-grading is what lifts Bucharest above them both. I visited in mid-Spring, so vegetation wasn't a problem.
