Welcome back to part two of the Sachidan Taiwan oddessy. Today our heroes venture to Taipei Zoo.
We had been in Taiwan for less than a day when the president called. Taipei zoo had just opened and we were inspecting the geese when my phone rang with presidential urgancy. I sprang to attention, saluted, and unlocked my buzzing phone. This was an emergancy, we were about to be hit by an earthquake!
Now, it was only at the end of March that year that I had encountered my first ‘quake. The big one in Bangkok 2025 and I can’t say that I fancied another but, hold on a second. How did I get here?
Why, via the ‘brown line’ of course. Plenty of comedy gold on the brown line but this is a family blog so… We rose at 7am for a pretty ordinary breakfast at The Courtyard, fighting a a Korean old-man tour group for front row at the buffet. Out by eight and onto the ‘brown line’ which is a dinky pneumatic-tire metro that put me in the mind of Paris. Our lucky-winner cards got us in for free and we are off to the first exhibit.
The breastfeeding room sounded like a good opportunity to see mammals exhibiting nurturing behaviour but it was empty, I guess we were too early.
If you need to make a call, the zoo-phone has you covered. You may think that a coin-and-card operated phone is a bit old fashioned but you should know that Taiwan is the global supplier of AI chips.
Indeed, here you can see a public AI terminal, repurposed from a mailbox. Write your prompt on a postcard and the national AI will mail you back with its response. Free!
Our first visit was the geese.
They’re actually not that cool and probably don’t belong in the zoo, but just around the corner… Sachie’s favourite!
It’s the Meercats. These cute African friends are one of the highlights of any zoo visit and this enclosure was great. They have their own mound for tunnelling into and I expect a concrete basin around the enclosure to stop them tunnelling out. Boys hang around outside while mum and the kids laze about underground.
I expect that you are familiar with meercats. They adopt this upright stance on the African savannah to look out for predators, climbing to get a better view of the horizon. In the clan, each member takes their turn on watch duty and will whistle to alert the rest of danger.
But they don’t have cell-service in the burrow so didn’t get a very special message from the president…
We found out the next day that the earthquake was a 5.8 far to the Northeast and we didn’t feel anything. The meerkats did though, they came streaming out of their tunnels and looked very alarmed.
But pretty soon it was back to the dayshift of looking out for eagles and hyneas.
And the next stop was, whatever this thing is. Big enclosure, long muzzle… Beats me.
Well, it turns out that we got cuddles and kisses from one of these at a Bangkok exotic pets display earlier this year. He’s a coati, from South America. I don’t know why he’s got the neck-pillow collar but it’s probably because he was quite rowdy. As a quick aside, at the same display they had pet meercats.
And the astute among you will notice the banded tail of the trash-bandit in the background. There were baby racoons.
They are very affectionate.
It was utterly heartbreaking to leave them and I felt a deep instinctive urge to look after these little monsters but I happen to know that racoons are… demanding. Destructive too. For the record, we didn’t pay a penny for this, we just walked up and they crawled all over us. This is a young civet cat:
As I said, very affectionate, heartbreakingly cute but so very, very wrong. These are not domesticated animals. They are wild and need to be treated with respect. But let’s get back to Taiwan.
Oh fucking hell Sachie! What did I just say? No no. No! You can’t take her home.
The joke’s on you, this is actually a plywood cutout that Sachie is poking her head though, you can see some of her flowery dress on the bottom-right. Looks cool though. The panda enclosure was pretty cool too.
Pandas mostly just hang out and stuff themselves with bamboo. What an odd thing for a bear to eat.
No I’m good. I guess bamboo is just the ticket. But it’s hard to digest, so pandas spend a lot of time doing this:
Reprising Jack Black’s character from Kung Fu Panda. All that said, it’s a pretty awesome exhibit, but I wish people would try to take photographs without their face in the foreground. It was a real struggle to get these shots without some Chinese chick taking selfies in the way, but moving on.
You’re no kind of zoo without a caiman or two. The sign says don’t tap the glass.
Moving on, the otters are super-cute and my favourite. Maybe they’ll be more welcoming.
OK… There are some capybaras, in bronze.
They’re not as good as the ones at the capybara café in Bangkok:
Don’t worry Sachie, maybe we can find something to cheer you up.
There’s the pyjama-pig* you like them right? What’s that? Too sleepy?
Oh shit, not again. Sachie got attacked by a hippo in Malaysia and broke her ankle at the start of the year and still hasn’t recovered. They kill more people in Africa than lions, you know.
But Sachie has made her peace with these gentle giants. I think if she can forgive them then we all can learn to get along.
I haven’t mentioned the big group of people in wheelchairs, although they’re more like high-tech mobility machines and the people in them all seem to be paralysed. One tube going up the nose and another draining into a lower bag of yellow fluid. We bumped into the a few times. If you ever find yourself paralysed, Taiwan is the place to do it. Brush up on your Mandarin.
Next stop is the Pangolin-Dome!
Yep, we didn’t see many pangolins, but they’re a shy animal and apparently made of medicine. This big aviary was great. The paths climb up and down and switch back in a helix so there is a lot packed into the space.
Like these red… things. Apparently they’re crimson cranes.
There’s little monkeys that are so tame you can walk right up to them. Delicious!
Only kidding. No skylarking in the Pangolin Dome or this guy will report you.
I think this is a blue-tailed bee-eater.
But for me the stars of the show are these two toucans.
I love these birds with their glossy black feathers and colourful beaks.
The spend a lot of time cleaning them and appear to be very conscious of their appearance.
I mean, the bill is kind of distinctive, hard to miss. So you would want it looking its best, like this:
These Central and South American birds are omnivorous but mostly eat fruit. Specifically, Fruit-Loops.
Their large, colourful bill is used to prise or slice open cereal boxes and slide between the box wall and cereal bag to extract toys and tokens.
They collect these colourful amusements to decorate their nest in the hopes of attracting an easily-impressed mate.
They’ve got one of these parrots, from Africa.
Now, pay attention to him because he’s going to be returning in a later post. There’s lots of other stuff in this exhibit. There’s a nocturnal zone with aye-ayes and a freshwater aquarium. If you visit, don’t skip this. Next up some lemurs.
These guys have the dazed look and blackened face of Wile E. Coyote when a bomb as gone off in his face.
Getting side-eye from this guy.
The jackass penguins were cool to watch swimming around and these ones apparently give friendship-bracelets to each other, see the wing above. They have king penguins too but there was a rowdy group of primary-school kids I had to elbow aside to get my shots, so they’re not very good.
By now we were getting hungry and grouchy but there was a little café in the next exhibit. There’s an indoor seating area where they have small exhibits, like rodent skulls, death’s-head cockroaches and poison frogs. Not the best place to enjoy a hotdog. But then again, where is?
Next up is the eastern cattle herron.
These graceful white-and-tan waterbirds are native to the region and they’re not an exhibit.
They live here.
Yep, these silky thieves fill the same ecological niche as Australia’s bin-chickens. We would end up seeing these guys all over, which was great.
But, footsore already, it was back on the brown line.
Now, I’m afraid I’m going to have to fast-forward through some of the next bits. I know that my readership enjoys the loving detail of these accounts but we’ll be here all day otherwise.
We stopped at a couple of stationary shops (I can’t catch the moving ones. Zing!) because that’s the kind of thing I like to do but I found a lot of the stationary in Taiwan more fanciful or decorative than the stuff in Japan. Not cheap either.
By then the only thing left was dinner.
Nothing like a hotpot full of soured cabbage and pork to fuel up the fart-factory, all helped along with lashings of Taiwan Beer. Delicious!
And that’s the story of our first full day in Taipei. I’ve got to say that this place is growing on me.
* While writing this, Taipei Zoo welcomed its newest member, a baby tapir. It’s criminally cute.