Saigon Zoo and Botanical Garden

2 stars due to skinny looking animals. I understand that we cannot compare them to the zoo back home but this is animal cruelty on a certain level. Did not completely hate it as I noticed the zoo keepers being gentle with the animals.

Butterfly park had a measly amount of Butterflies flapping around. They were all either eaten by the salamanders we saw or, they died from kids plucking out their wings whilst their parents watched proudly.

Tiger, lion, leopard enclosures were a joke. You could clearly see they were agitated. Most of them were pacing up and down, a white tiger pounced onto the glass after prowling towards us.

Hippo had nowhere to move. He had two options, stand still in the water or out of the water.

Bird cages were disgusting, toucans stuffed into cages no wider than their wing span. I refused to take a photo of them. Macaws were packed into cages with other birds.

The Gazelles were beautiful. Even though they looked starved their enclosure was the right size for them. Defeats the purpose.

The only enclosure we approved of was the deer enclosure. It was huge and deers looked fed. Surprised to see some wildebeests in there.

Hyenas were curled up into a ball. Neither of them looked healthy. Clearly most of the animals were sleeping off their starvation.

The worst part of this whole experience were the locals. They were throwing rubbish into the enclosures, screaming and banging the cages. Children and adults were petting the goats a little too hard, feeding paper from the bin to the goats. They were banging on the glass of all the enclosures and the zoo keepers did nothing. Hippo and Crocodiles were hit with one or two plastic bottles. They threw random leaves into the elephant enclosure which the Elephants scurried to eat. It was truly a pathetic sight. And to make things even more ridiculous, there was a show going in the middle of the zoo blasting loud techno music, which kept startling the monkeys driving them into a screaming frenzy.

I hope this review gives you a perspective of what your experience would be like. Best not to patronise this zoo. There are many other things to look at in Ho Chi Minh.