After a bit of a break, my sister sent me another instalment for the Family Affair series (taking into account that she’s studying and working as an intern at the same time, I’m pretty surprised that she found time for that :). She celebrated her birthday recently and took her friends for a day out in a Wild Animal Park in Shanghai. Here’re some tips from her, if you’re planning a day out in this park:

1) To get to Wild Animal Park you can take Line 2 to Longyang station (Maglev station) and transfer to Line 16 which will take you to Wild Animal Park Station. This road will take more than 1.5 hour from the city centre. After you get off subway go to exit 1. There you’ll have 3 choices: 1) Taxi for 15 RMB 2) Bus 3) 20 minutes walking to the park. It depends on what you want: save more energy for walking in the park or enjoy a moment of being in the middle of nowhere, passing gardens with vegetables and peach trees.

2) There’re different ticket types and prices. About 130 RMB for adults, 65 RMB for students (take your valid Bachelor student card, if you have it, with dates of issue and expiration). There are also tickets valid for one year and some group choices.

3) After you enter Wild Animal Park take a map. You’ll see that you have plenty of things you can do during the day. One more thing to mention – come in the morning: less people, more time, it will close at 5 p.m.
Your plan might go like this: walking around, take bicycle for 3-5 people to see more, relax nearby a lake or on one of the lawn spread out around the park, later take a bus and see wild animals just in front of you.

4) I want to be more specific about the bus. There are two kinds: a simple bus with glass windows and a special one with grating instead of windows (you should pay 35 RMB more for it). Both of them are taking you into the closed walled areas: with tigers, lions, cheetahs, etc. When a special bus takes you there, Park worker will feed giraffes, bears, lions, tigers and will try to make them come close to the bus so that you can see tiger’s eyes in front of you and meet a bear face to face (btw, a bear even took a ride on top of our bus).

5) After you get off the bus, you can find small baby animals to take photos with, take a ride on an elephant or a horse, etc, etc. They also have some restaurants, but those might be not to everyone’s liking. NB, park employees barley speak English or don’t speak at all (Check out an info sign in English on a photo below). Take a smartphone with a translation app ;)