Zoo #18, Haus des Meeres, 27/4/17 and #19, Tiergarten Schonbrunn, 29/4/17
Another double shot, both to ensure that I keep on track and because without it the first post would be on the scanty side.
I'd toyed both with not going to Haus des Meeres at all, and with going to it after rather than before Vienna's main event. I was prevaricating all the way until 5 minutes before I left the hostel whether to go on a rainy, cold Thursday or wait until a public holiday weekend (Monday being May Day here).
I'd just decided on rain being preferable to crowds when fate intervened. I was going into a supermarket to buy supplies and turned to hold one of those swinging metal gate things open for the person behind me. He wasn't anticipating that, though, and was pushing the gate open with his trolley. The result: one crushed hand.
For a while I feared at least one of the fingers was broken, which would have caused all manner of problems from having to find a doctor, to not being able to fill out immigration and customs forms at borders, to the most pressing of all: not being able to inject my insulin.
Luckily it wasn't as bad as all that, though I have one very purple and still quite sore finger. Regardless, by the time I'd gone back to the hostel to ice it, contacted a friend who is a rehab specialist to determine what I needed to do and found a pharmacy for some painkillers and medical tape (but most importantly the painkillers), it was 2PM: too late in the day to head to the zoo.
Instead, I went to Vienna's smallish but charming natural history museum (which has, among other exhibits of interest here, a paddlefish, an enormous sunfish, a thylacine and cases for several of each of kakapos and kiwis). And once that was done I was able to take advantage of Haus des Meeres' late opening hours on a Thursday.
I was interested in this place less for the collection itself than the very strange setting. For those who aren't familiar it is built inside a World War II flak tower. The building is tall but slender, and the aquarium is set across no fewer than 10 floors. Before that starts to sound like a substantial aquarium though, many of those floors have room for only two or three small exhibits by the time space is allocated to the elevator shaft, stairs, life support systems and other off-display facilities
The collection itself is unremarkable apart from one genuine shock: a Chinese giant salamander. I've seen Japanese ones here and there, but the Chinese species is much rarer, both in captivity and the wild, yes? It occupies a tank with a couple of white sturgeon and other fish.
There are three shark tanks - a small one on the 10th floor for bonnethead sharks, a 'Pacific Eye' kelp forest tank that has horn sharks and is only viewable through a bubble window, and the largest of the three houses blacktip and whitetip sharks as well as a Green sea turtle (and miscellaneous bony fish), spreading across two floors.
The aquarium claims that its largest tank - on the ground floor and including a tunnel portion - holds 500,000 litres, but if that tank is 500 cubic metres in size then I'm a very poor judge. To be honest I've already forgotten what was in there, but felt it was wasted somewhat.
There are a lot of very nice reptile exhibits scattered up and down the building, and there are lots of small tanks, especially on lower floors, for small fish and aquatic invertebrates, both marine and freshwater. There are decent, if very space-constrained, mixed-species tropical houses on both sides of the building, one of which houses Goeldi's monkeys and white-faced sakis that seem *very* habituated to visitors being less than 50cm away.
The Haus des Meeres is interesting, though I don't think I'd visit based on its strengths as an aquarium as opposed to the curiosity of its location. The question I have, which wasn't really answered, is why? Why build an aquarium in this building that is fundamentally ill-suited to it? A shark tank on the 10th floor? I don't really get it.
The real zoological drawcard in Vienna is, of course, Schonbrunn. My visit was a little troubled from the outset: I am prone to bouts of insomnia, no doubt related to my diabetes (and perhaps in this case a very sore hand): and one of these bouts set in in earnest in Vienna. By the time Saturday rolled around I'd had three successive nights with less than six hours sleep. I know many manage on that quite well, but I don't and I gave serious consideration to going to Vienna on Monday, a public holiday, instead. That I decided not to was partly to minimise the number of pram jams I would have to deal with, but also to ensure that I at least had a chance of doing everything else I wanted to in and around Vienna. And it wasn't as if I were going to get back to sleep that day anyway.
So I was perhaps a little primed to be irritable and disgruntled when I went to the zoo. I entered from the gate closest to the giant pandas - a lovely outdoor exhibit that ranks among the better ones I've seen for blob bears. But the other exhibits in this area underwhelmed. Was this lion exhibit really what one expects from a contender for best zoo in the world? No, I didn't think so.
I was baffled by what I found in the hippo exhibit. On the positive side, there was a much better land to water ratio than in accustomed to seeing. But what I didn't and don't understand is why the hippos were locked outside, but without access to the water? All three were lying out in the sun because that was all they were able to do. It was the middle of a sunny day. I couldn't make sense of it.
At this point I was beginning to think I would fall on Arizona Docent's side of the debate, that Vienna was a decent but ultimately unremarkable place. But then a stroke of fortune began to change everything.
I had received the news of the bird flu-prompted closure of the desert, rainforest and bird houses with absolute dismay. Apart from wanting to see all of one of the world's most famous zoos, one message that came through in AD's own thread about Vienna was that they were among the very best the zoo had to offer. So to miss out was galling, no matter how just the reason. I communicated with the zoo via Facebook to try to ascertain if they knew when they would reopen, but the best answer they could give me was that there would be tests performed in late April, and the results would need to be uniformly negative for the situation to change.
I gave up all hope. I even looked into making a lightning strike back to Vienna later in the trip, before largely discarding the idea as impractical. And so I resigned myself to seeing half a zoo, and perhaps the more underwhelming part at that. So try to imagine my joy, then, when I approached the Regenwald building and saw people going in and out! Two and a half of the buildings are open again, and given the timetable the zoo mentioned to me it must have been a very close run thing. Who knows, perhaps it was my poor bruised finger that made the difference.
By the way, the 'half' that remains closed is the rainforest portion of the bird house, which was closed on the rather surprising basis that one of the species within is currently breeding. Frankly I think that's a very poor reason to close an entire exhibit: if breeding the species is important enough to provide them with privacy from the public then all well and good. Better to pull them off exhibit, keep them separately and make sure the show goes on. Imagine how often walk-through aviaries would be closed if all zoos adopted this practice. However, two and a half open houses are better than none and I am not looking this gift horse in the mouth. All are excellent exhibits, even if I rather wish I'd done a bit better with my passerine hunt.
And so the tone of the day shifted, and my initial discontent slowly morphed into genuine delight. The tiger and spectacled bear exhibits are very good indeed. The aquarium and reptile house is a gem, as are the various other reptile exhibits scattered here and there. Unlike Zurich, where I was immediately awed by what I found, Vienna's charms revealed themselves to me slowly. There is nothing as groundbreaking as Masaola here, and I think on most paired comparisons (elephants to elephants, tigers to tigers and so on) I would still place Zurich ahead. But pairwise comparison isn't infallible, and Vienna has character that Zurich doesn't.
Vienna's history is its blessing and, to only a limited extent, its curse. I'm guessing heritage overlays exist over the entire circle of exhibits surrounding the old pavilion, and for good reason. But they've done a lot to make them the best exhibits they can: I like how they have installed the window panels to enable the gates at the front of each paddock to be opened. It's a small touch that changes the feel of the exhibit. And using what was once an iron cage to turn into a viewing point into the cheetah exhibit is a subtle master stroke that will go unnoticed by 99% of people who visit, but I appreciated it.
Moreso than the Jardin des Plantes, which I described as a living museum, Vienna remains a living, evolving zoo. It just takes more adaptability than, say, Zurich needs to have. For a 265 year old that has quite literally been through the wars, it looks pretty damn good.
I'm not sure I agree with our learned colleague Mr Sheridan about Vienna's pre-eminence in Europe... but I'm not sure yet that I don't, either. That's a question I think I'll return to in time.
