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Kirsten

Bird Paradise, Singapore 2025

After leaving the Singapore Zoo, I headed for the shuttle bus to get to Wildlife WEST and visit the newest (when I visited) park in the Mandai Wildlife Reserve – Bird Paradise! Here you enter a beautiful entrance featuring a waterfall, head past some shops and restaurants and finally enter the park. And it certainly has a very new feel to it, it looks modern and sleek, I really like the design and layout of the park. Bird Paradise opened officially at the end of 2023, and took the collection from the Jurong Bird Park (in another part of Singapore) and expanded with huge walk-through aviaries and a large collection, featuring over 3000 individual animals over hundreds of species. Birds are not generally my thing, the fear of being pooped on or swooped at by a flying bird generally steers me away from walk-through exhibits, but I’d come all the way to Singapore and already had the 4-park ticket so decided to take a few hours to visit.

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Kirsten

Singapore Zoo, Singapore 2025

I already posted about seeing the giant pandas in Singapore, and about the rest of what the River Wonders park can offer – I visited all 4 of the Mandai Wildlife Reserve parks on my trip, now check out what I saw at Singapore Zoo!

Singapore Zoo opened in 1973 and grew quickly in the number of species they were showing, they even exhibited giant pandas back in 1990, so fitting for Singapore to again be home to pandas. Singapore Zoo is the second largest of the 4 Mandai Wildlife Reserve Parks but it has the most diverse range of species that you can see while the other parks are slightly more specialised. When I visited it definitely felt like the most popular park, however it was a Sunday. I had my multi-park ticket that I used (S$110), but a single ticket for entry would be S$49 for adults and S$34 for children. Opening hours are 8:30AM-6PM and I ended up being there from around 9AM until 3PM, and honestly it would have been easy to stay the whole day – but I had Bird Paradise to squeeze in as well! In that time I think I saw almost all the animals and even enjoyed the 3 animal presentations that are on offer.

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Kirsten

River Wonders + getting to the Mandai Wildlife Reserve, Singapore 2025

Of course as well as seeing the giant pandas at River Wonders, I also saw the rest of the zoo! River Wonders is based at Mandai Wildlife East, next door to both Singapore Zoo and Night Safari – more on those coming soon. River Wonders is open 10AM-7PM daily, and you can either buy a single-park ticket (S$43 adult, S$31 child) or a multi-park ticket (3 options to choose from) – I opted for the 4-park ticket (S$110) and visited all 4 locations over 2 days. This is a great option over buying the individual tickets, and I purchased this online in advance so had the QR codes saved to my phone to enter. Here the big attraction is obviously the giant pandas, but there’s plenty more to see.

I did think it felt quite small, I did spend most time at the pandas but did look around everything else River Wonders has to offer as well. This is just my opinion, but if the pandas weren’t here, then I wouldn’t have visited as there’s not a lot else that you’re *guaranteed* to see – however if you really like fish, and some obscure species at that, then this is the place for you! Without the pandas, I think 1-2 hours would be ample time to visit, for me with pandas a whole day was required.

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Kirsten

P A N D A S @ R I V E R W O N D E R S S I N G A P O R E February 2025

It’s my first time visiting the giant pandas in Singapore! Giant pandas arrived in Singapore from the CCRCGP Ya’an Bifengxia Base on the 6th of September 2012, and honestly I had no idea how long ago it was, that’s over 12 years they’ve been living in Singapore (I really had it in my head that it was more recent). They stay in the River Wonders park of the Mandai Wildlife Reserves area in a specialised climate-controlled home, the Pavilion Capital Giant Panda Forest. The River Wonders park (formerly River Safari) gradually opened across 2012-2014 (it looks like there were different phases, with the pandas being opening stars!), so it’s a pretty new zoological park in general – more on that in an upcoming post with what else you can see at River Wonders!

So finally in February 2025 I’ve made it to visit these pandas, my first pandas of this trip and of 2025 and the first pandas I’ve seen in almost 9 months, that’s the longest I’ve ever gone without seeing a panda (well, since before there were pandas living at Edinburgh Zoo)! I had such a great day visiting the pandas here, was a great viewing experience and environment for pandas, and I would highly recommend it if you’re ever in Singapore, or a nearby country. And had such a lovely experience meeting some of the Singaporean panda fans – I then went on to meet one of their friends when I was in Dujiangyan, and met one of them again in the Chengdu Panda Base, who it turned out had seen me and Jeroen (from Giant Panda Global) at the Dujiangyan Base last year when we were mobbed by school kids, what a small world!

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