Zoo #31: Wroclaw Zoo, 24/06/2017
I should probably apologise to FunkyGibbon, who asked via a private message a few days ago if I was off to Poland next. No, I answered truthfully but perhaps not quite honestly, I was not at that time on my way to Poland. I was already there.
This was an unnecessarily complicated and slightly conflicted visit. Outside the dozen or so recognised Category A zoos across Europe (of which I have so far visited five: Beauval, Basel, Zurich, Vienna and Prague), Wroclaw was my wildcard, with its big and varied collection and one of the biggest new developments in the world, let alone Europe, over the past decade. I wondered if it might actually rank ahead of some of those dozen or so, but be suffering from its (relative) isolation.
By the time I left the hostel a little later than hoped, I only had about 6 hours to play with, because I was in Wroclaw for one thing only and had a bus out of town late that afternoon. I discovered the unnecessary complication on my way to the zoo, when I reached into my bag for a blood testing strip (I have mentioned before that I have diabetes), only to find that I'd neglected to pack any for the day.
A pain in the backside (though not in the finger for once, I suppose), but I didn't double back. Not only would that have come at the cost of a rushed and probably unenjoyable day, but I can typically tell if my blood sugar is low, and I at least had some ketone strips with me. They are what you use when your blood sugar is really high, to tell you if it's something to worry about. So for a few hours I could dead reckon the lows, and I could test for ketones in the afternoon as a double check.
I finally found my way to the zoo - the Plzen blisters were not yet healed, and my hostel was 600m walk from *anything* useful, so it was another painful day - and found a map. They charge 3 zloty for it - about 75 euro cents - which was annoying enough, and they have them in vending machines, so I couldn't get a map until I found a souvenir shop attendant willing to change notes for me. Irritating. As an aside, the zoo also had ticket vending machines: they are further along than most in replacing their paid visitor services staff with unpaid robots. I wonder how long it will be until zoos start to use automatic feed and medicine dispensers and watering systems to reduce keeper numbers, too.
The Afrykarium is really what it's all about here. It's an enormous, modernist slab of a building plonked in the centre of the zoo, and it looks the most like a convention centre or art gallery of any zoo exhibit I've ever seen. In the right setting - a revitalised post-industrial district, perhaps - I think I'd love it, but at the zoo I feel it imposes on and diminishes its surroundings. I intended to go in first but instead diverted in search of a toilet, thanks to another hay fever-induced sneezing fit. It's late June, for goodness sake. I think I might just be allergic to Central Europe.
From the bathrooms it made more sense to knock off the small 'European' loop at the top of the zoo, which turns out to be one of the best parts of the entire park. It has a gorgeous bear exhibit - with Zurich, Vienna, Plzen and now Wroclaw, Central Europe must be the best part of the world to be a zoo bear - and it reminded me of a deciduous Jurassic Park T-rex enclosure. It has the same ugly wire fence at the front, but a huge, leafy expanse behind it. I didn't find the bear, but I didn't mind. I've seen plenty of brown bears and very few enclosures as good as that. The other exhibits around here - for ibex and Barbary macaque, and for lynx and wild cat - were also good. Lynx might just be the exception to the rule that all small cat species get ripped off in zoos.
I delayed my Afrykarium foray further by covering all the exhibits to that side of the zoo, including the lemurs, lions and a variety of hoofstock fields. The latter are pleasant, but don't offer anything that Prague and Plzen hadn't earlier in the week. I gave them all rather short thrift, though that was partly because of my xenophobic immune system too. Getting inside was going to be a blessed relief.
Afrykarium, then. When I've visited 'zoo' aquariums before I've caught myself wondering whether they could get by as standalone attractions. Sometimes the answer is a firm 'no' - I can't imagine anybody ever paying enough money to visit Antwerp's aquatic hall, for instance, to keep it afloat. Sometimes the answer is 'maybe': Zurich's Exotarium comes to mind, though the aquarium exhibits are still only part of the greater whole.
In Wroclaw the question isn't whether Afrykarium could stand on its own two feet. The question is where it would rank alongside Europe's other big aquaria. Clearly behind Valencia and Lisbon, I think, but whether it jumps ahead of Genoa is a matter of taste and species preferences. As an aquarium the Afrykarium is held back by its paucity of small species and habitat tanks, but if you throw in the small aquarium building elsewhere in the zoo, and the excellent Oder River exhibit then that base is covered. There are certainly enough big name drawcards - sharks, penguins, sea lions, manatees, crocs and hippos see to that. Throw in some nice-sized cichlids and Red Sea tanks, and the excellent rainforest aviary and you've got yourself a pretty great aquarium.
I didn't love the hippos - I'll say it again and again, they don't need much water area, what they need is grass - but the manatees, sea lions and especially penguins were all very good. The latter might - no, is - the best I've ever seen. A huge surface area without compromising on depth: it was great to watch the penguins really building up some speed through the water. As an aside, I learned at the Afrykarium that the Polish name for a penguin is a 'pingwin', and I shall probably be running with that from now on.
The rest of the zoo is patchy, to be truthful. As has become a habit, I largely breezed past the various big mammal, and some small mammal, exhibits. Unless a zoo is doing something particularly interesting with them, my attention span has dwindled to almost nothing. The bottom right quarter of the zoo (if looking at the map) is quite weak, with bear pits that aren't worthy of sharing the same zoo as the brown bear one mentioned earlier, an antiquated elephant yard and a few ho-hum other bits and pieces. The monkey house is also a bit humdrum - it's ok, but nothing special and the external cages are small.
There are some excellent Island exhibits for squirrel monkeys and gibbons, though, but here's the thing: yet again they were all in their night quarters. It's becoming my biggest take home message from this trip: given the choice between an expansive, naturalistic, open air environment and the concrete dorm room they sleep in, animals overwhelmingly want to be home-bodies. I can't quite decide whether that's a problem or not.
With Wroclaw's reputation for diversity in mind had wanted to make sure I gave plenty of time to the bird and reptile houses, but I needn't have worried about the bird house. The indoors space was closed - I'm not sure if this is normal or I was just unlucky - and I was underwhelmed by the aviaries that ringed it around, or the small parrot aviaries near the reptile house (the castle-style aviaries for owls were better).
After the disappointments with the bird house and that lower right portion of the zoo generally, I sat down to check my blood sugar using the very rough method I described earlier. I'd felt low about an hour earlier and had some soft drink and now the ketones reading was...
0.3.
A reading of 0.1 is essentially a 'nil' reading and 0.2 is a warning sign (for me, at least) that you might want to take extra insulin, and that now would be a damn good time to do it. My diabetes control, in spite of a slovenly lifestyle, is surprisingly good and I don't think I've ever been at 0.3 before. What blood hadn't been used for the test must have drained from my face. If that test was accurate, and *if* I couldn't bring things back under control quickly, my time in Poland had just become very, very stressful indeed. The sort of stress only an extended stay in hospital could induce.
What I should have done was abandon the zoo, hop on the first tram back and get a proper blood sugar reading so I could figure out what the damage was. But the zoo was no more than 2/3rds seen, and it's likely to be many years before I am back this way. I decided to have an each-way bet. I gave myself a middling-sized extra dose of insulin, to jolt the blood sugar into coming down without it being *too* quick (potentially just as dangerous). And to flush - yes, literally flush - the apparent ketones from my system I bought two litres of water and gulped as much as it down as I could, until my belly was sore.
Those steps taken, I began rushing about the rest of the zoo. I wanted to at least see it, to have a concept of it to take home with me, but to be honest my mind was churning so rapidly that I wasn't enjoying myself. I raced through the terrarium, taking just long enough to realise I could have spent two hours in there. The exhibit quality is so-so, but the collection is remarkable. And they specialise in lizards, the so often over-looked poor cousins of the reptile kingdom.
I dashed about, covering the remaining outdoor exhibits, and resisted testing my blood again, however stressful it was, for 45 minutes. There would be no point testing earlier, because my mitigation efforts wouldn't show up in the test, so I just dashed from exhibit to exhibit trying not to dwell too much on whether disaster may have struck. Finally enough time passed and I, somewhat shakily, performed another test.
0.1.
Deep breath. Lots of deep breaths. I was ok. I think the first one must have been a random error in the reading, as I don't think the ketones, if they were there, could have gone away *that* quickly. Either way, there was now no reason not to stay at the zoo for the hour I still had available. Indeed, there was a compelling reason to stay: if I may be indelicate, that almost two litres of water I'd drunk was still going to require flushing, ketones or not.
I gave the remaining time, then, to the terrarium, which was certainly the most deserving. I couldn't help myself and began counting the lizard species. 86 species. 86, in one building! This must be a world record. And the diversity is from across the entire spectrum of the sub-class, from Komodo dragons to day geckos and from beaded lizards to chameleons. Astonishing.
I'm left struggling to categorise Wroclaw. Its best is enormously ambitious and enormously successful, but then there's also highly antiquated exhibits, and quite a few of them. The collection is remarkable for reptiles but sub-par, comparatively, for birds. I think it's going to be closer than most to cracking into that too dozen or so... but I'll be surprised, and slightly disappointed, if it does.
Later that day I stood at the bus station, more or less at the eastern end of Europe's zoological core that stretches in a wide south-easterly arc from Chester down to Vienna, Prague and Wroclaw. I have not stepped foot in arguably the two most central of those core zoo countries, Germany and the Netherlands. But here's the trouble: Wroclaw was day 78 on my Schengen visa. With only 12 days to go, could I really do credit to those two countries' zoo cultures, let alone their broader cultures? No, and it would be unfair to try. So instead I headed further east.
