Khao Kheow Open Zoo

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For my one full day in this area, I had my second zoo day of the trip to Khao Kheow Open Zoo. Before going to the zoo, I was unsure about how big the zoo actually is and how much a car is actually needed or whether it is still easy enough to do it on foot. They advertise themselves as the largest zoo in the world by area, and it seemed that the place is designed to be done by car, but I decided to try and do the zoo on foot anyway.



The people at the entrance seemed a bit surprised that I wanted to go in on foot and I was told that the road around the zoo is 8 kilometres which is quite a lot in the humid, hot Thai weather but manageable. The alternatives to walking if you don’t have your own car are either taking the sightseeing bus-thing around the zoo which goes around slowly but doesn’t stop so you see what you can while you’re moving or you can hire a golf cart for 350 baht per hour (£8) which is quite a lot for a whole day particularly when considering Thai prices. So I did some of the zoo on foot and it clearly was not designed for someone to walk around since there were no pavements along the road between exhibits and you just had to walk along the road, all the signs were placed to be seen by cars, there were parking spots next to every exhibit, etc. It was manageable on foot for a while though, until I reached the first drive-through enclosure with signs telling people not to get out of their vehicles so pretty much making walking any further completely impossible since there were also no pathways to bypass it.



Instead I had to ask my dad to drive me around the zoo so I did manage to see everything, however I couldn’t do it as slowly and linger at the exhibits for as long as I would have liked if I was by myself. Aside from the obvious annoyance about not being able to walk around the zoo, I did like it a lot. It is very well set up for cars and from a car it is well-polished because you don’t see or notice certain things on foot and a section of over 1km with no exhibits is not annoying when you’re driving. With very few exceptions, all of the enclosures and facilities looked very new and very aesthetically pleasing. I would say just about most were also very large and well done for the animals, though quite a large number looked pretty for the visitors but were too small or could have been done better for the animals such as the enclosures in the ‘Wildlife Wonderland’ exhibit and the cat complex which were quite small (especially considering the effectively unlimited available space that the zoo has) and I think a few enclosures had the illusion of being bigger than they actually were because of the natural looking environment surrounding it with the aim obviously being to make the enclosure look like it was part of the natural forest. I thought many enclosures were very good though, for example the Common Hippo enclosure and the big bird aviary.



As far as the collection, if you compare the size of the collection to the area it will seem very small, but if you put all the enclosures next to each other and removed the huge amounts of unused space it’s not such a huge zoo and the collection is much more impressive. Khao Kheow has a large number of ABCs and all of the animals that the general public expects to see in a zoo, but in many cases they have large collections of different taxa most notably extensive bird and cat collections and the primate collection is not bad either with e.g. four species of gibbon. There are also quite a large number of unusual species at the zoo like Mainland Serow, Flat-headed Cat, Jungle Cat, Lesser Bird-of-paradise, Blue-rumped Parrot, Brown Hornbill, Greater Green Leafbird, Red-shanked Douc, etc. If I have time I might post a species list for Khao Kheow since I don’t believe there is one on the forum.





One funny thing that I heard at the zoo that I thought was worth mentioning is that as a tour bus drove past the binturong cages I heard the driver refer to the animals held in these cages as ‘binturong as in Mr Bean’ (presumably giving the pronunciation because that’s how he pronounced it) which I just found quite funny.

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