One thing I find interesting here is how they have one price for foreigners and another for locals. Okay, so granted, the foreigners can probably afford a little more than the locals, but they don’t really distinguish between foreigners who are tourists versus foreigners who live here. I live here, I am not a tourist, and I’ll probably live here for several decades. With Fahim, of course. But do they care? Not really.
Price differences? A fair bit.
Foreign adults: Rs. 500, or US $5.
Local adults: Rs. 25, or US $0.25.
Yeah, that’s fair.
They had a map available, which I got the last copy of, if you believe them, which I don’t necessarily, and it was less than useless. The zoo has undergone some renovations, so the numbers on the map I got bear no resemblance to reality. On my map, there are 15 numbers belonging to identified areas, but in reality, there are 60 identified areas. We asked. 🙂
Given the state the museum was in when I went to visit it, I didn’t have high hopes for the zoo. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It didn’t smell – other than the bathrooms. There was no litter. It was clean, in other words. And yes, it would have been better had they had functional maps, we still found our way around. They also had a large number of refreshment stalls that we saw – more than a half dozen. This is impressive given how small the zoo is. No, not living room size, but much smaller than it could be.
I guess I’m comparing it to the last zoo I remember being to – the Edmonton Zoo, and that was back in, uhm, 1988? Yup, that’s a long time.
See, the zoo is on a busy street in Dehiwela, and it’s surrounded on all sides by houses. They’re updating it – the elephant area is being totally remodelled – but behind the new elephant enclosure, you can see houses and houses and more houses.
How large is it? Oh, I don’t know things like that. But I can tell you that it’s a lot less than a 1/2 mile square. Probably closer to a quarter mile square. So that would be, what, about 40 acres? Not a lot of room.
And it’s also not like they have anywhere to expand to.
I think the next zoo Sri Lanka builds is going to have to be significantly out of town in jungle areas. Don’t think that’s too likely anytime soon.
Now that I think about it, the land the Colombo Museum was on was significantly larger than the land the zoo is on. Perhaps they should trade?????
