Our visit to Colchester Zoo took place on the hottest day of the year so I don’t feel we stayed as long and saw as much as we would have done on a slightly cooler day. However I can now state that, even during the school holidays, there are plenty of places for sitting and eating icecreams!
We arrived relatively soon after opening time and found plenty of places to park though we did have to queue up for about 10 mins to buy tickets. Once inside there was masses to do and we planned our route around the zoo so as to be at the display arena at the appropriate time to see the “Life on the Wing” show at the special request of our grandson. This was easy to do as the zoo has lots of interconnecting paths, although some of them quite steep. We found this display better than many similar shows we have seen, particularly as it included a vulture. Very hot sitting in the full sun but hardly noticed this whilst enjoying the show.
I will not comment on the individual animals, sufficient to say that there was everything you would expect to see including elephants, lions, giraffes, pigmy hippos, rhinos, wolves, penguins, monkeys and apes of many types etc. All of the animals looked very well cared for and many were in attractive new houses and enclosures. The zoo is themed in areas such as “Kingdom of the Wild”, “Lost Madagascar” etc. As you wander around there are several good children’s play and activity areas as well as challenges such as pulling as hard as a chimpanzee or trying out your sprint speed. It is also possible to feed the elephants and giraffes at set times but we were not in the right area at these times.
The whole site seemed very clean and well cared for with a variety of eating places. There were several under cover areas with animals which would have been useful if we had visited on a rainy day. We definitely plan to go back as we could not fit in all we wanted to do and see in the one day, particularly the many shows and animal encounters.
The website is www.colchester-zoo.com and we paid high season prices of £17.50 for seniors, we had a free entry ticket for our grandson but admission for him would have been £13.50. Not cheap but well worth the money for such a good zoo.
