Animal theme park opens new gig for tourist

TRY out a new experience this summer, this time it’s the animal who will visit you personally, no cages, no fenced areas and best of all, its all in just one area.

Zoobic Safari, which brought to Subic Freeport the only tiger safari adventure in the country, is now offering a bigger, improved animal show, plus an educational camp for adventuresome kids and adults.

Want to see poodles that waltz, monkeys that dunk a basketball, pigs hurdling obstacles, or dogs dancing tinikling? Then Zoobic Safari is just the place for you, said company CEO Robert Yupangco.

Yupangco, who opened several new attractions recently in this popular theme park, said Zoobic Safari
launched early this month the “Zummer Zoobic Safari” program, with additional facilities and entertainment features that the whole family would surely enjoy.

“You can do so many things here,” Yupangco said. “You could go camping. We have a boot camp, with a course. You can learn different things like how to breed animals.”

Under the special summer program, Zoobic Safari has headlined its daily entertainment fare with an animal show, where Jenny the monkey impresses the audience with her acting skills, Vera the dog successfully undergoes a tricky question-and-answer segment, while poodles dance and show their athletic prowess, and potbellied pigs jump and fool around.

Then, a tour of the whole theme park follows, with tour guides providing trivia about the golden
pheasants, tarsiers, albino water buffalos, moon bear, camels, and other animals featured in the park.

The tour would actually take half a day, at least, as it includes a visit to the “Rodent World,” which has specimens of cloud rat, one of the biggest rodents in the world; the “Rodent Saloon,” which is equipped with small bath tubs, hair blower and shampoo for its tiny furry customers; the “Serpentarium,” which has a collection of pythons and other reptiles; and the “Tiger Safari”, where visitors ride on metal-screened jeepneys to get close to tigers roaming in their natural grassland habitat.

The tour, of course, wouldn’t be complete without going to the “Savannah,” where ostriches, potbellies, wild bears and guinea fowls roam freely; the “Animal Muzooeum”, which boasts a rare collection of stuffed wild animals and mounted animal skeletons; and the “Croco Loco,” which, of course, features live crocodiles.

The tour is capped later in the afternoon with an animal parade, where representative specimens of all the animals in the park, both wild and domesticated, are brought out in a parade that is actually a modern take of the biblical story of Noah’s ark.

Despite the overwhelming number of attractions at Zoobic Safari, Yupangco said the theme park is only about 30 percent completed.

“We have yet so much to do, and I think 50 years is not enough to accomplish all that,” Yupangco said with a laugh. “We now have 50 tigers here, but we will soon introduce white tigers. A lot of zebras and giraffes are also coming in, and yes, an elephant.”

Yupangco also mentioned plans for animal races, which include greyhounds, horses, and quite surprisingly, even chicken. This is in addition to Zoobic’s ongoing breeding program for endangered animals, and a “pit bull program”, which trains what are otherwise known as fighting dogs for the non-aggressive activity of racing.

And more is yet to come, as the management is currently working to add to the list more adventure rides, a forest camp with trailers painted in tiger stripes, as well as fishing and canoeing.

Early this month, Zoobic also broke ground for its latest project — the “Aeta’s Way,” which would enable tourists to experience how it is like to live close to nature, as the indigenous people of the Subic Bay Freeport still do.

For this project, Yupangco said that a parcel of the theme park would be developed, complete with air-conditioned cottages and first-class amenities of modern living.
This seemed ironic, as Yupangco himself admitted, but he added that the idea was for Zoobic Safari visitors to get a grasp of the Aeta lifestyle without sacrificing comforts.