Trip to the Nehru Zoological Park, Hyderabad

This was our second outing in Hyderabad and we thoroughly enjoyed it. The scene was the famous Hyderabad zoo and the ideas was to meet all the main residents and the wild cat that was recently brought to the zoo.

The zoo was one of the best that I have seen after the Mysore Zoo. The ones that my son got excited with were—the large sea tortoise, the Siberian white tiger, the leopards, the hyena, the royal Bengal tiger,  lion, giraffe, the Sambar (I suspect just because of its name—“so tell me vappa (dad) – now is Sambar curry veg or non-veg?”), peacock, the baboon, the rhinoceros and the macaw parrot.

We reached the zoo around 11am and found it a little crowded, may be because it was the next day to Ramadan festival. Lot of kids chaperoned by elderly were keeping the security guards and zoo wardens busy.

If you are visiting on a 4-wheeler, there are two options—(a) go driving right into the zoo with a Rs.1000 ticket or (b) park your car outside—either inside the zoo gates, near the ticket counter or outside the zoo gates on the main road. If you cannot walk much and need to carry food, water etc, I would suggest you to go in with the car, but you would have to park appropriately walk around and come back and take the car to the next spot. You might endup walking as much as you would do otherwise, except if you have a chauffeur (in our case, myself).

There are other means to move around in the zoo

1. An eco- and animal friendly option is to rent bicycles within the zoo (nice idea from the zoo authorities) and ride anywhere
2. Take the electric cart drive which will take you to all the main places. You can get on and get off anywhere as the cart capacity allows
3. You can take the toy train drive which again traces the same route as the road, and
4. Last, but not the least, walk it up

The zoo is arranged such that you enter and take a left, stop were needed, move around in a circle and reach back to the entrance, where you started. There are some places to find refreshments inside as you walk by the cages and enclosures. However, if you need some serious food, you need to go near the last leg of the trip where you will find a restaurant.

We were not able to see the entire zoo as it started raining towards the end and it was too crowded to get into the train or cart. I also missed some sections that I would try to cover in my next trip like – the train ride, the lion safari, the natural history museum and some sections like the bison and the reptiles.

Here are some photos from the trip. The photos were taken from a Nikon D50 (i know, it's old) 28-80mm, that was handed down to me by a friend when he upgraded to a better shot. He runs a service apartment in Trivandrum, that I found real value for money, if one has to spend a few days visiting Kerala.