I love the zoo

So in summer 2018 week I went to Zoo Nights at London Zoo. I was ridiculously excited about this and had never been to London Zoo before, which is silly because I had lived in London for 18 months and I absolutely love the zoo!

I was fortunate growing up to live near 3 really good zoos in East Anglia – Banham, Africa Alive and Colchester, going a few times a year.

My family have always been animal lovers so we have enjoyed going since we were young and I have lost none of my enthusiasm!

Night time Zoo

The night zoo at London Zoo appealed so much because let’s face it, the worst part of going to the zoo as an adult is all the screaming hyperactive children running riot and pushing to the front of everything and their parents getting annoyed if you don’t let them 🙄

So the promise of no under 18s present with the added bonuses of street food stalls, bars selling alcoholic beverages and fun visual things like acrobats and light up animals was just too good a chance to pass up.

So off I went on my first adventure to London Zoo, with my poor boyfriend who was forced to come with me.

Food and drink

Obviously we went straight to the alcohol and food after taking some pictures of monkeys on the way in. There was plenty of different street food to choose from, from kebabs to pizza. 🍕🍗🌮🍻

My boyfriend managed to pay for and eat his burger in the time it took me to get halfway through the queue to the Greek food stand, but halloumi fries are life so 🤷🏼‍♀️ they were SO good!

We mostly drank cider, which was fairly reasonable at £5.50 for a Rekorderlig can, considering it was a captive audience and they could have charged more. There were a few bar vans so the queues were never too long thankfully. Although you were allowed to take your drinks around with you, there weren’t any bars anywhere other than the main area, so good to plan drink stops into your route!

The animals at London Zoo

Craig managed to go get us a great spot for the penguin feeding, while I was still queuing for my food, which was awesome – who doesn’t love penguins?! Plus their pool is gigantic! Very cute.

Then we went for a wander to my favourites, the big cats. I love big cats they are so majestic, however they also always seem to be super lazy, which was probably made worse by the gorgeous setting sun and warm evening that it was. Still, I was already very happy. We took some pictures of us pretending to wrestle the giant tiger statues too because we are hilarious.

London zoo has lions and tigers, but at the night zoo the Lions were spending their time sleeping so didn’t get any cool pictures of them.

By this time we needed more drinks so we went back to the square. On the way we found the light up animals, acrobats and so forth so photo shoot time happened and I got a tiger tail and ears because I was wearing a tiger shirt and it seemed appropriate (plus now I have my Halloween costume sorted) 🐅

We went on the carousel too because there was no queue and it looked fun. Then it was time to head to the African animals, turns out there is a little tunnel to them which is fun. We saw the giraffes etc and were almost peed on by a charming lemur which decided to do all its business right above its visitors heads!

We also managed to fit in the night time enclosure where there was a very chilled sloth and one of my other favourites, bats 🦇 I think they are so cute! They were all hanging up or eating fruit. Don’t know how people can think that they are gross or scary tbh.

Finally, as it closed the latest, we headed to the reptiles, which I was excited about purely because I’m pretty sure the ornate entrance doors are the ones they used in Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone for the scene where Harry sets a snake on his cousin Dudley and I am a huge HP nerd so yay! 🐍

Handily the bugs are elsewhere, so those of us who aren’t too keen on spiders and creepy crawlers are safe wooooo.

The night zoo experience

All the enclosures shut around half 9 and we made our way out to the exit. Unfortunately for my boyfriend this involved walking through the gift shop and I am now the proud new owner of a cuddly lion and penguin, who I just love 🦁🐧 anyone who knows me will be aware of my love for cuddly animals so this was just the perfect end to an amazing evening for me 😍

I would highly recommend going to the London Night zoo to anyone – especially if the busy vibe of the zoo usually puts you off. But it’s a good fun evening, not too expensive at £18.50 a ticket and you can get drinks and dinner too, and play on carousels, get your face painted, what more could you want?!

Tickets can be purchased / more information available on this link for the remaining available dates in July!

I for one, will definitely be going back next year!

Update: I did indeed go back in 2019!

Once again I had a great time and was not disappointed! We were even given free magnum ice creams to try out their new vegan flavours which were pretty tasty!

We even got to see the lions, who were asleep the previous year so that was cool!

Hopefully I can persuade Craig to keep taking me every year…