There are plenty of animals to see at the Shanghai Zoo besides the pandas – it’s a smart move putting the pandas as far as you can from the entrance, it means you have to walk past at least several other animals before getting to them! So of course, I saw some other animals. Now I didn’t find the zoo quite as impressive as the Shanghai Wild Animal Park, but I would still return if it fitted my schedule – priced at 40RMB, it’s not too expensive of a day out and it’s a huge park to explore and relax in.
The zoo is split into 7 areas, mostly divided by type of animal. On this visit I was mostly in the carnivore section, but also went to the children’s zoo and saw some of the herbivore section. Now I didn’t see a lot of animals, I spent some time looking for the red pandas and only got lucky with one sleeping up a tree and I tried to look for the leopards as their space looked really cool with you walking on a bridge over the middle (up near the pandas in the Native Animal Zone) but I didn’t have a lot of luck. There was also a little construction going on in some of the spaces, but that comes with the territory of a Winter/low-season visit. I did get lucky with the brown bears, there was a cub when I was there and I happened to be visiting on it’s 1st birthday! This seemed like a big deal as there were media people and staff taking lots of video and making recordings, which was interesting to see. The yard wasn’t the easiest to view and from where I could see it was all through glass – it also wasn’t the nicest space for bears if I’m being honest, but as a whole I think the animal yards here weren’t too bad. I didn’t take nearly as many photos as I thought I did, so there’s not a lot to share, but a snippet for what would hopefully be a full post from a future trip!
Compared to Shanghai Wild Animal Park, I didn’t see any interactive/animal feeding opportunities here, however I may have not been at the right animals of sections of the zoo to see that – so in some ways, that’s a bit of a ‘pro’ for the zoo. Whilst the signs at the pandas were mostly in English as well as Chinese, at all the other animals that I saw, signs were only in Chinese, however I thought the designs and presentations looked very nice.
