Is there a more authentic visitor immersion experience at any other American zoo than winding ones way to the bathroom at Binder Park?
An excerpt from my 2010 review:
Wild Africa – The immersive qualities of this area have to be seen to be believed, as once the tram drops passengers off in the African Village at the beginning of Zuri National Park there is the definite feeling of being on the Dark Continent. A passport office, a vast background of a dilapidated restaurant, jeeps, luggage, bicycles and cracked cement reeks of authenticity. To venture to the restrooms means side-stepping piles of luggage, tied-up parcels and other odds n’ ends. The Kalahari Kitchen café has laundry hanging outside, along with wooden beams and African words scrawled in random places. All of this might or might not appeal to certain zoo visitors, but I thought that the entire area was brilliantly constructed.
The centerpiece adjacent to the large village is the 18-acre Savanna with these 10 species: reticulated giraffe, Grant’s zebra, marabou stork, ostrich, African crowned crane, bontebok, impala, greater kudu, addra gazelle and waterbuck. There are numerous viewing opportunities of this enormous field, and while at times there perhaps could be more of the animals than just a handful of each (for example I saw zero kudu and only one bontebok) there can certainly be no complaints about the amount of space given to such a variety of savanna creatures.
Along the long walking trail (0.8 miles or 1.3 km) are these exhibits: a huge, sloping yard for African wild dogs; a walk-through aviary for colouful finches and other songbirds; a beautifully constructed habitat for red-capped mangabeys inside a grimy and packed researcher’s tent; a mixed-species exhibit for colobus monkeys and black mangabeys; a red river hog enclosure; a forest aviary that is very appealing to bird lovers; and a forest farm with goats, guineafowl, watusi cattle and zebus. The whole area is fantastic, and the only drawback is the lack of animals. There are long sections of trails in the woodland that have no exhibits, and I couldn’t help but think how many more exhibits could have been placed here. However, this zoo is like Fort Wayne and only opens for about 6 months of the year and thus the cold winters might be too tough for many African critters.
The best part about Wild Africa is the attention to detail, as I have described in my review of the African Village. A trail of 53 flags (one for each African nation) greets visitors at the tram station, in parts the trail is muddy and filled with loose debris and all of the exhibits are without exception very impressive. A wider selection of African animals would have made this an all-time great exhibit, but as it is I was tremendously excited with my journey to Africa.
