Jonathan's Spontaneous Travels: Night Safari

The Singapore Zoo has a Night Safari attraction, which is essentially a full zoo containing only nocturnal animals, that opens only at night, from 7:30 until midnight. It features a 40-minute tram ride with narration that shows off the major animals, and then 4 walking trails of about 20 minutes each where you can see even more animals, and much closer, at your own leisure.

Overall, it's really impressive. It's very safe, sanitized, and Disney-esque, but done in a way that hides all that. The animals are not really in pens, for dangerous animals they use trenches to contain them, but position the trenches and vegetation so that you can't really see that there are trenches, so it feels like the animals are right there and could even come at you. The safe animals, like wallabies and deer, and not in pens at all and are free-roaming, you can walk right up to them and they can walk right up to the tram, and they use vented cattle crossings in the road to prevent each animal from wandering to another section.

This puts you face to face with a lot of interesting animals, like hyenas, leopards, lions, giraffes, elephants, and some exotic Southeast Asian animals. The bat section was particularly cool, it's an open-air pen (with a net about 40 feet up) full of bats that you can wander through and walk right up to and do everything but touch the bats. I've always found bats to be pretty adorable up close, and this was no exception, but it is a little unnerving that they're right there and could fly at you if provoked.

This was an usual and recommended experience. Unfortunately, given that it is a dimly-lit night attraction and flash is understandably completely prohibited, taking photographs with standard equipment is pretty difficult, so I apologize in advance that my photos suck.