We are on a mission to explore Bali as much as we can this year, but we are mostly limited to the weekends when Olive is off school. Last weekend’s day trip was to the Bali Zoo. We have been to the similar but more popular Safari and Marine Park, and the Bali zoo sounded like a good day out for our kids, and as a bonus, it is only a 15-minute drive south of Ubud.
The zoo is situated in lovely landscaped gardens with a real jungle feel. When we arrived at 10am there were not many other tourists around so was a great time to see the animals.
We all posed for photos with a cheeky baby monkey. They take official photos, but the staff are happy to take photos for you on your own camera too. Our advice: don’t trust them to use your camera, I think they purposely take bad shots so that you buy from their official photographer (a conspiracy!). You can buy the official photos as you leave the zoo, they look good but are not cheap.
The animal petting place had one large deer that hogged the food handouts and was a bit scary. Clare had flashbacks to the aggressive deer in Nara Japan – they were truly scary and didn’t hesitate to try and bite her bottom!
The tigers were pretty cool. There was a white tiger, thankfully not this one. This photo is better though as the real one was sleeping.
And Olive wanted to feed one. That chicken did not last very long.
Other highlights included the very loud howler monkeys, some very large bats, some interesting rhinoceros hornbill birds, a massive crocodile. Everyone had their own favourite, for Casper clearly the elephants, for Jetson it was the warthog (which he called the water pig), Clare loved the cute Otters, Olive found it hard to decide but settled on the peacock, and a close second was the fluffy guinea pigs, I was most impressed with the hornbills because they have a bigger nose than me!!
By lunchtime, we had finished our stroll around the zoo loop and seen everything. It had only taken us a couple of hours. We were a bit hungry, but the restaurant was expensive and the menu didn’t look that flash, so we had an ice cream instead then headed back to Ubud for lunch.
The zoo is not as extensive as some of the other parks here in Bali, but well worth the effort going if you have young kids. The place is not even listed in the Lonely Planet for Bali, our usual source of reliable travel info. We think it should be. The Bird and Reptile Park is next on our list, stay tuned for our report.
Zoo Details
- Address: Jl. Raya Singapadu Banjar Seseh Sukawati Batuan Sukawati Gianyar Bali, 80582, Indonesia.
- Phone: +62 361 294357
- Website: www.bali-zoo.com
- Price: basic entry $24/$12, which is quite reasonable. We saw that you could buy tickets online and save 15%, but we decided we did not trust their online ordering system totally, and wanted to personally check all the pricing options before buying our tickets. We just went with the basic entry, and had to pay for Casper (it was only under 2’s that got in free), which is fair enough as Casper had as much fun as any of us. There were options to spend more on packages which included elephant rides, feeding animals, photos and lunch.