The morning started well, then badly, then well and ended badly.

I slept. It was good, until I realised I’d slept right through breakfast. I got up with less than a quarter of an hour before check-out time. Even with a shower I made it with a couple of minutes to spare.

Then the six mile drive to my day’s entertainment. “One of the top zoos in the world”, constantly one of the most visited attractions in the UK, it’s so busy it doesn’t have its own roundabout. It has two.

It has otters! Nowhere with otters can be bad.

They were also among the few animals that you can see at the zoo. Lots were hiding from the cold, and later the rain, and just not in sight. Many more are hidden behind tall fences or glass, so you can’t really see them properly. For a zoo with so many animals it was remarkable how few you can actually see.

It doesn’t help that the whole zoo feels geared around two primary ambitions: High throughput of visitors, and raising cash.

Even before I got in they were trying to add 10% to the ticket price as a voluntary donation. Not a single tiger in sight, but plenty of posters about sponsoring them. What at other zoos would be a £30 ‘feed the animals’ experience are £300.

That can be ignored. What really broke things were the lack of seating or even just space to wait by the animal enclosures, so that you can more easily wait for them to appear, watch the ones you like, or – in the butterfly house or the tropical aviary – wait for your camera lens to de-mist. I have no photographs of butterflies or birds of paradise because waiting for the camera to clear meant standing blocking a narrow walkway that nobody had any choice about using.

So as a zoo it’s not good for seeing animals and utterly miserable for photographing them. Go to Arnhem Zoo instead.

As for “You truly feel like you’re actually in the islands of the Philippines, Papua New Guinea” I will credit the zoo with not making that claim. It was nothing like Papua New Guinea. Not even close.

It was however eventually very wet. Heavy steady rain that showed no signs of stopping. The animals hid inside, the people hid inside, I walked along getting wet looking at a sad black rhino that was stood alone in the rain, small waterfalls running off its back.

No waterfalls off me but after reaching my car I took off my t-shirt and wrung water from it. Even after that it was still soaked. I had a spare in my bag, drove home without catching a cold.

A few hours after getting home my legs are sore. I need more practice walking 🙁 Only 7km across the day, including the time in the zoo..