Avilon Zoo

Stroller friendly.

We loved the interaction with the giraffe! That's by far my own favorite. We enjoyed feeding the pigs, bearcat (1st time to see these), goats, sheep, rabbits, guinea pigs, peacock and peahens. The iguana feeding was a bust because they were not interested to eat. The kids loved the bunnies most of all because they could touch them. (You have to pay for the food to feed the animals)

I enjoyed being able to stand and see the big predators up close (with a thick mirror in between us) - bobcat, tigers, puma, hyena, etc. Because my experience in other zoos, you couldn't be near because they used cage wires. It's so different to be able to admire their fur or how big they are in contrast to us.

Other highlights: orangutan (he's quite big), the bears, bull, ostrich, mouse deer, crocodiles, snakes, hippo, etc.

Food:

1. There's a food corkage fee. It applies even to home cooked meals or snacks. P50 as of Jan 2023.
2. They have a canteen with rice meals at P180. The snack selection (esp for kids) isn't ideal (i.e. popcorn, fries, mais con hielo), so we are happy we brought sandwiches.

😞 My biggest disappointment:

• They didn't have a paper or online map of the zoo. An online map would have still been soo helpful. They didn't have a big overview map of the whole place on site too. They only have numbers and arrows (though helpful) to guide you from one area to the next. If they are able to do something about this, I would happily give them 5 stars.

• It would have been really helpful to know what animals are at which numbers, at the very least, so we can opt to go straight to certain areas or we can plan our day. Esp with kids, we can opt to hurry past certain areas so they can spend more time where the animals they really liked were.

• an effect of the absence of any kind of map: when we were trying to exit the zoo from #40 because we needed to leave already, we didn't know how to get out as quickly as possible without having to follow the numbers sequentially. So we had no choice but follow the numbers, sometimes finding out that we had gone around a loop only to find ourselves 10 numbers back, when we could have skipped that if we had only taken a different turn 10 mins ago.