This is taken from my blog from Asia last year... The foreigner price for the zoo is 100 Baht (about NZ$5). It is a good zoo. A number of cages aren't that great but none of them are terrible. There are huge numbers of large-billed crows flying all over the place which seem to be a big pest. I saw three continually harrassing a serow and another that appeared to actually be digging into the back of an Eld's deer. There were also huge numbers of children. I seriously believe that every single school in Bangkok had at least one or two classes there that day. A down side to the zoo for foreigners is that the signage is entirely in Thai (apart for the animal's name in English). That's not so important if you're a big know-it-all like me, but for the average person they might want to know why an Eld's deer is so important or want some information on Blyth's frog (that's the giant Malaysian frog such as what I saw at the KLCC aquarium). The best parts of the zoo were the reptile house and nocturnal house. The former had such goodies as elephant-trunk snakes (but I call them file-snakes), tomato frogs, crocodile monitors, and yellow anacondas (I had only seen the common or green anaconda before; the yellows are much more colourful than I'd have thought). All of them are very well housed and look well-cared for. There were good-luck coins in many of the turtle pools but I think the Thai people must be much more respectful of the zoo inhabitants than the Malaysians at Kuala Lumpur Zoo. The nocturnal house at the zoo was mostly devoted to Asian mammals (I think the only exceptions were sugar gliders and African dwarf hedgehogs). The enclosures were large, much larger than in most nocturnal houses, but not entirely stimulating for the inmates. The best animals for me were the brush-tailed porcupines, skittering around like giant spiky rats, and the binturongs -- I knew what size they were from books, but to actually see one moving around right in front of you is pretty staggering. They're huge! I'd love to see one in the wild. After the zoo I went to an aquarium called Siam Ocean World in the bottom of the Siam Paragon building. Don't ask why its called the Siam Paragon. The aquarium was amazing! I almost wrote that it blew the KLCC aquarium out of the water but they're probably as good as each other. I liked the reptile section at KLCC and some bits are better here or better there, but overall I think the Siam Ocean World wins out for me. Its a bit steeper in price too at 450 Baht! It opens with a display hall devoted to the stranger inhabitants of the briny deep. The very first tank houses garden eels! How cool is that? Then there's things like sea apples, nautilus, horseshoe crabs, Japanese spider crabs, pineapple fish (still love those), ghost pipefish... The tropical forest section is good but a little mixed up in places. There's a huge tank for silver dollars with a cow skeleton on the bottom (which made every visitor going past think they were piranhas) but there's also Asian and other fish in there (clown loaches, rainbowfish, etc). The walk-through ocean tank is huge, and you can take rides on top in a glass-bottomed boat. There's otters and penguins. There's a car aquarium. There's jellyfish. Ten out of ten for the Siam Ocean World.
