My parents have a habit, when they go to a new place, of going to the zoo. I’ve been known to do it too. For the record, Perm Zoo is terrible, one of those old-fashioned “all the animals are in concrete cages” zoos. Tallinn Zoo, a few years ago, clearly meant well but needed a lot more funding, Amsterdam Zoo is pretty good and Korkeasaari, the zoo in Helsinki… well, let’s talk about it.
The zoo is on its own island. You can pretty much see central Helsinki from its western shore. You can definitely see it if you stroll across to Katajanokka, the island that you don’t realise is an island next to Market Square, where Uspenski Cathedral is, where the SkyWheel is and where Allas Sea Pool is attached. Wander along the marina to the icebreaker fleet and the island behind that, just across the water from you, that’s Korkeasaari. At the moment, it’s a little difficult to get to. You have to get bus 16 from Station Square which takes about half an hour via the coast. You can also take the metro and either walk a kilometre from Kalasatam or pop up and get the bus. I took the bus out but jumped on the metro partway back simply because I hadn’t had any other reason to use the metro. Central Helsinki is too small, the trams are more than enough to get around. In the summer, you can take a boat over from Market Square. And last of all, they’re currently constructing a new series of bridges and a new tram route which will deliver you directly to the island from the city centre. That’s not going to be finished until 2025 or 2026, although I can imagine somewhere like Finland actually being able to keep to its schedule. We all know that if that project happened in the UK, we’d be lucky to get it done by 2050. Anyway, that’s currently causing a bit of disruption on the north shore of Korkeasaari.
The bus delivers you to the ticket office and then you have to cross over to the island on foot which is currently by a temporary wooden covered bridge that bypasses the construction work underneath. You have a map but then there’s no set route. You’d think it’s easy – it’s a circular island, how hard can it be to see everything? Well, it’s a circle. If you just do a circular route around the outside, you miss everything in the middle.
A little extra wildlife fun: in the summer, quite a lot of the shoreline is closed because it’s nesting season for barnacle geese. These geese are not content to stay within the closed areas so there are signs up all over the places to look out for them, don’t annoy them, don’t get in their way, and they quite happily stroll among the visitors, trailing their fluffy cheeping babies, and nest next to the wild animals and in the enclosures. They’re really cute, actually. The smallest geese I’ve ever seen but also very clearly just as capable of taking you out in a fight as any of their larger cousins.
Essentially, this is a rocky hump sticking out of the water with some trees clinging to it. A lot of the enclosures, therefore, have very bare rocky bottoms which kind of gives the impression of underfunded concrete enclosures. They’re not. They’re natural rock. Most of them are open, except the obvious ones like the monkeys and apes which would climb out as easy as breathing and the tigers, which would also climb and which you absolutely can’t have escaping. Then there are some houses, mostly for the tropical creatures which wouldn’t thrive in the Finnish climate, or the greenhouse full of birds. Broadly, it’s divided into five zones centered on particular attractions – Finnish nature in the south, Cat Valley in the west, Tropical Houses in the north, Bear Castle in the eastand Monkey Castle in the south-east with a restaurant in the centre (the map shows it upside down with the bridge coming in at the bottom which completely threw me). There’s a recommended route running roughly anti-clockwise around the island with wiggles in the middle to make sure you cover most of it but if you want to see everything, you’re still going to have to detour.
I enjoyed the island. I enjoyed the setting. I enjoyed the views across the bay. But I’m not 1000% convinced it’s the best zoo that’s ever existed. I know, it’s very easy to shriek that zoos are cruel and unnatural but in the 21st century, they do a lot of good conservation work and standards can be extremely high. I think Korkeasaari is definitely in the top half of zoos but I also think it’s got a bit of a way to go before it reaches somewhere like London Zoo. It’s lightyears ahead of somewhere like Perm, of course. But by its nature, it cannot expand and maybe some of the enclosures could do with updating and being made a bit more green and a bit more interactive – I mean like when the animals have to do more work (playing) for their food rather than sitting and waiting for it come to them, more things to jump on and bite and rub on. I’m having a complete brain-blank on the word. Enrichment! Interactive sounds like I want zoo visitors to be able to go in and touch the animals and that’s absolutely not what I mean. Not that I rate zoos but if I did, I think this would be a 7/10 zoo. And of course, for it to improve, it needs money and saying “Well, I’m not going until it’s a 10/10 zoo” would make it harder to get that money.
So, in short, yes, absolutely go to Korkeasaari. It’s a good zoo and an interesting experience and it’s a good excuse to use your travel card to jump on the metro. There was an enormous dog, a Rottweiler, I think, under the seat next to me, attached to a pink lead, her nose twitching whenever anyone new boarded but otherwise happily snoozing.
And that afternoon, I went on the SkyWheel but that’s another blog.