Last year I has a series of posts about the biggest, nicest and most famous zoo of the country. Caging animals is not the best thing to do, I agree, however, this is the closest we can get to some wild animals and for kids it's nice to see these animals live and learn in the same time.
This zoo is situated on a hill above the Transylvanian city of Marosvásárhely, Targu Mures (the official name), Romania. The zoo was founded in the 60's and it's functioning ever since. There were just a few species at the beginning, but with all the development going on over the years, there are more than 750 animals, 150 species. Basically it's a huge park laying on 40 ha land. It's open all year round and usually hosts 180,000 visitors annually.
Last year the place was closed for a couple of months or maybe more, due to the pandemic, but after being able to open its gates, visitors has been coming from all over the country ever since.
Entry
Entry prices are pocket friendly if I can use this expression. The ticket for adults is 20 lei, which is roughly 5 euro, students play half, kids pay 5 lei, approximately 1 euro and organized group for kids get a special price of 2.5 lei. The good news is, they don't ask for student ID, so if you have kids that look like students, you can ask for student ticket.
It totally worth it, trust me and I'm going to show you why.
This is the entry and exit point, which look pretty empty, but trust me, it is all manipulation 😜. When we got there, there was a huge crowd, 3 buses full of kids were waiting to get in. It's a famous place on the map and kinds are brought here from all over. So we had to wait for them to get in and give them an advantage as otherwise it would have been too crowded. This is the reason I didn't want to pick the weekend as the time of our visit, but it looks like others are smart too as they came on Friday, just like us. So the crowd was gone when I took the photo.
Right next to the entrance there was this old camera you could take a photo with for 10 lei (2 euro) and get the photo right away. I'm wondering what's the trick here, what kind of photo device they are using. No one was interested at the time of our visit, but that doesn't mean anything.
This is the coolest thing I've ever seen here. These are strollers for kinds under 10 and are free to use. As I said at the beginning of my post, this place is huge and for toddlers and kids under 10 can be tiring, so they thought why not make it fun. Kids absolutely love it.
The whole place is created in a way to be enjoyable for the kids. Right at the entrance there's a stone statue, featuring a couple of lions, which is always full of kinds. They climb on the lions to take photos, so I could hardly ever get a photo of these lions.
The map you can see on the photo above is a very kids friendly drawing of the place. You can see how big the place really is. It takes a couple of hours if not three, if you want to visit everything and spend a few minutes looking at the animals, taking photos and pet them.
When I said the whole place is like a park, I meant it. There are benches all over the place, where you can sit down to rest a little while enjoying the view and have a bite maybe. Feeding the animals is forbidden!
Not far from the entrance there's this pavilion, which seems like a reconstruction of the old one.
The first stop is at the monkey house. Education is important here, so there's a collection of photos with description on the wall, from which you can learn what kind of monkeys do you see inside.
The place has a glass cupola and some tropical plants in the center.
Photographing animals and kids is the hardest job and trust me, I had to work hard to take some good photos.
This little guy couldn't care less about my photo quality. He or she was doing the rounds and moving constantly.
He's a golden-bellied mangabey, according to the board. These boards are everywhere, each species has one, with all the details one needs to know. I really appreciate the details as we don't have these animals running around free in our country. Another plus is the multilingual board as they have visitors from all over the world.
Unfortunately the Japanese macaques were too far from where visitors are allowed, plus the net was too thick, so the photo is not great, unfortunately. They need privacy and this is a protective measure to prevent visitors from feeding the animals. I've seen kids throwing salty chips and bread to monkeys. None of those are good for them.
This is an outside cage, looking like a real playground and even thought at the time of my visit, these crab-eating monkeys were resting, they usually having fun running up and down on these wooden logs.
This is it for today, stay tuned for the next episodes as there will be interesting.