Saigon Zoo

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Once I had gone out to find breakfast I called a Grab to go to the zoo. A GrabCar that is, not a bike. I felt that not dying was worth the 57p extra cost. There's probably a way to get there by bus, but the Grab was less than £1.10 and it didn't feel worth the effort which isn't the best example for budget travel and you could spend a long time in Vietnam for incredibly cheaply but since I'm only here for two weeks, I'm going to strike a balance. On that breakfast note though, I would like to make the observation that Vietnam knows how to do bread! Seemingly no where else in Asia does good bread, sure Malaysia has slightly odd but perfectly good potato buns, but Vietnam has actual French baguettes! Proper ones!



Getting to the zoo involved lots of cutting across junctions in ways that seemed less than ideal as well as lots of honking and bikes where the driver was either looking at their phone or had headphones on. Although all the bikes are horribly scratched and the traffic can be a bit slow, some kind of order does seem to emerge in the road and I haven't actually seen any accidents.



So in terms of the zoo then, it's a tricky one to review. I don't think you can really call it a 'good' zoo but it's difficult to just dismiss it as a standard bad zoo. Many of the enclosures are small and concretey and cage-like. In fact, I would say that most of them have far too much concrete and metal bars, but very few were actually horrendous and the zoo clearly has old infrastructure and enclosures that it can't change and they seem to be doing the best they can with the infrastructure that they've got. The reptile house seemed pretty bad, it looked very run down and many of the reptiles seemed to have various injuries, but for many of the mammals and most of the birds the enclosures seemed perfectly ok. They had the appearance of looking run down and a bit neglected, but I don't think they were particularly neglected from an animal welfare point of view, they just looked old. It's very different to any of the Singapore zoos of course which all look very fancy and nice but I wouldn't say Saigon Zoo is horrifically bad.



The zoo is Saigon Zoo and Botanic Gardens so has some greenery around including an orchid house and bonsai tree garden. There were very few birds around despite the greenery though and it actually is noticeable. I didn't see any mynas for example and only a couple of pigeons. There were absolutely loads of very large House Rats though and a few squirrels too. I think they're Variable Squirrels? Around the lotus pond there were some swamphens along with storks and things and I think the swamphens are probably part of the captive collection rather than wild (?) But Indochinese Swamphens would occur around here and would be new.



There were a fair few interesting species around including Golden Cats, Burmese Ferret-badger, Pangolin, Javan Mongoose, and on the bird front quite a few pairs of Crested Argus which is a really nice bird and hopefully they're breeding there because they do have a lot of them. The zoo also holds Red- Black- and Grey- Shanked Doucs which is nice.



The zoo feels a bit scattered around haphazardly and the map is comically bad, but this is comparing it to Singapore's very visitor experience oriented sort of set-up.



It was very hot and humid of course and it did rain a far bit which I sat out for because I was in no rush. Luckily, there were lots of stalls selling ice cream or what the label described as 'vanilla flavoured confectionary with compound chocolate' presumably because those mass produced cones were too far removed from any milk to refer to them as ice cream.



You could do the zoo in probably about 3 hours but ideally it's probably a half day zoo and I stayed until about 2. The enclosures are extremely difficult to photograph through and it does feel a bit run down, but if you have your expectations set right - which I did - and you're not expecting something that would fit in Western Europe or Singapore it's perfectly good. I've seen much worse enclosures in EU zoos and I think a decent job is done with what they have.



I then headed back to where I'm staying in the city centre in what is called District 1. The city is divided into district 1-19 which is a distinctly Hunger Games-esque way of numbering the city. Another brief comment that I'll make is that I'm pleased to finally be able to plug in my European sockets into the wall without an adapter here in Vietnam. It's the first time since May that I've been able to charge things without needing a massive clunky travel adapter.



I chilled in my room a little bit - it's air conditioned so literally chilled - and went for a walk around the centre just to look at everything. Boring is definitely not a word you could use to describe a walk around the centre of Ho Chi Minh. Bloody terrifying is more like it. Whenever I had to cross a road, I really felt like I was increasing my chances of death by orders for magnitude and the pavements are used entirely for bike parking and for street stalls so you have no choice but to walk in the road. Christ on a bike - because you know he would be on a bike in Vietnam - it's really tiring! At dinner, I ended up having a long but very interesting conversation with the owners of the restaurant, one of whom was a neuroscientist. You know, a neuroscientist running a local restaurant in the city centre, bog standard stuff.



Tomorrow, the plan is to get a bus in the morning to head to Cat Tien National Park!

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