Taronga Zoo

If you’ve ever wanted to get seriously close to a Sumatran tiger (without there being a terrible ethical or safety problem in the way), now is your chance. Tiger Trek is an experience that's free (included in the cost of your Taronga Zoo tickets). Attendees are invited to get into a flight simulator that takes them (very quickly) from Mosman to the Way Kambas National Park in Sumatra. Upon landing, you travel through an Indonesian-inspired village, meandering down a path past village shops and through a rainforest that looks uncannily like you’re in Indonesia. At the end, you'll get the chance to meet the three Sumatran tigers who were born at Taronga Zoo in 2019, as well as their beautiful mother, father, uncle and grandmother.  With only 350 Sumatran Tigers left in the wild, these tigers are incredibly important. Sumatran tigers are critically endangered, but as seen through Tiger Trek, all is not lost. Deforestation in Indonesian rainforests has decreased by 75 per cent since the folks over at the zoo began monitoring it in 1990. There has been a steady increase in the consumption of sustainable palm oil worldwide, with shoppers far more aware of the devastation caused by unsustainable palm oil harvesting than ever before. It's easy to feel helpless when it comes to this stuff, which is why one of the coolest parts of Tiger Trek is Choice Mart – this end room of the trek has been built to look like a supermarket check-out, complete with interactive touch screens that show

Back in December 2022, Taronga Zoo scored two impossibly cute baby dingos – fluffier than all of our wildest dingo dreams. The opportunity to meet the pups was a huge hit at the zoo, and though the canine creatures are now a little bigger (and notably less fluffy), it's still fascinating to witness Australia's only native canid up close and personal. Warada and Kep Kep were born on Dharug country in NSW, and Wathawurrung country in Victoria, respectively.  Australian mammal keeper, Natalie Holdsworth described them as the  “perfect pair”, with Kep Kep (whose name means sugar in Wathawurrung language) apparently extremely sweet, friendly and engaged with all the people around him. Warada (whose name means beautiful in Dharug language) is meant to be highly inquisitive and switched-on, with her focussed on surveying her territory and the world around her. Visitors to Taronga Zoo are able to meet the dingos IRL, with the zoo putting on a special (and free) Dingo Keeper's talk, as well as a new ‘Dingo Encounter’ experience that lets you get up close to the canine cuties behind-the-scenes. Held at 1:30pm daily during school holidays and costing $69.95 per person, this interactive experience will allow you to sit ‘paw-to-paw’ with the pups as they get taken through a dingo enrichment program, where they will play right in front of you. How’s that for some dingo delight?    Did you know that the lyrebird at Taronga Zoo has been imitating the “evacuate now” alarm ever since the lions