Taronga Zoo

Jan 23rd, 2008 by Nick

I’m not a big zoo fan. I’ve never been to the Brookfield Zoo in suburban Chicago, and I’ve only been to the Lincoln Park Zoo a couple of times. I keep meaning to go to the San Diego Zoo, but something always comes up. But it’s impossible to go to Australia, and not go to a zoo. I did not go in Melbourne, so my last major sightseeing task for the vacation was a visit to Sydney’s Taronga Zoo.

The zoo is in a fabulous location, on a peninsula almost directly across the harbor from the Opera House. The easiest way to get there is to take a ferry boat from Circular Quay. The ferry takes 15 minutes, and drops you off at the southern or “bottom” entrance to the zoo. As the zoo is on a peninsula heading into the harbor, the elevation changes dramatically across the zoo, with the parts closest to the harbor being at the lower elevations. To get to the top portion, you can take a Sky Safari (not me, I do not like chair lifts at all), or if you bought a combined ferry/bus ticket, you can take a city bus for three minutes to go the mile around the zoo to the top entrance.

I spent two hours at the zoo, and I was glad I went. I did not try to see everything, but instead focused primarily on the Australian animals (kangaroos, koalas, emus, etc.) and the elephants and giraffes. The Taronga zoo is big on their elephants, and are building a new habitat for them this year. In fact, if you go into the center gift shop (closest to the elephants), you won’t find anything with a kangaroo on it. But I managed to get some kangaroo, koala, and penguin related merchandise in the lower gift shop.

Getting confused in the center gift shop delayed me just long enough to miss the 2pm ferry back to Circular Quay by about 90 seconds. Fortunately, it was a beautiful day, and it felt good to just sit and relax at the pier despite the various tantrums being thrown by assorted 2-9 year olds. A quick ferry ride back turned into a bit of an ordeal as there was a problem with another ferry, and we had to wait fifteen minutes for a different quay to open up.

By this point I was starving, and so I collected a Harry’s meat and veggie pastie from a stand near quay #4, and an order of gelato from the stand near quay #5. Once I finished those, I took the train back to Town Hall and made my way back to the hotel.