Singapore

April 7, 2025April 6, 2025 Kirsten

Night Safari, Singapore 2025

The final park of my Singapore trip, something totally different, it’s Night Safari! I’m not sure if many, or if any, other locations have a park like this – the opening hours are 7:15PM until midnight and you can see nocturnal animals in their natural routine. I was surprised to hear that Night Safari has been open since 1994, I really thought it had only opened more recently than that and I think it certainly attracts visitors for being incredibly unique. I will preface this by saying that I’m not great at twilight or night-time photography, so I didn’t get a lot of photos (or actually see a lot of animals) but I still think it was worth experiencing! Night Safari is located right next to both Singapore Zoo and River Wonders, so you can easily walk between the sites – with the entrance area shops and restaurants opening at 5:30PM so an option is to finish up at one of these parks then stroll on over for dinner before the Night Safari.

April 3, 2025March 30, 2025 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.

March 31, 2025March 27, 2025 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.

March 20, 2025March 16, 2025 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.