An offbeat look at Mandai Wildlife Reserve — with the team in tow
There is something quietly absurd about Mandai.
Not in the way a zoo is absurd — but absurd in the way only Singapore can be: with extraordinary competence, immense money, and not a single apology for either.
Singapore has no natural resources. We import our sand. We buy our water.
The founding generation was handed an island and a problem, and turned the logistics of other people's resources into a civilisation. The whole national project was about borrowing the world's wealth of things.
Mandai is the culmination of that logic. A nation with no natural wildlife of its own, now wealthy enough to acquire the world's wildlife and display it to the world's tourists.
We have become so good at the business of things that we can simply purchase the wonder of things.
Rainforest Wild Adventure
We went as a team — which thankfully changed the texture of the experience. Rainforest Wild Adventure, Singapore's newest zoological park, opened just a year before our visit. Thirteen hectares of reconstructed Southeast Asian rainforest, Malayan tigers, clouded leopards, sun bears moving through a canopy that was planted deliberately, species by species, to feel ancient. It does not feel ancient.
But it feels earnest, and that counts for something.
The team were mostly delighted in the uncomplicated way that people are when they are outside and slightly lost and something large is nearby. Someone spotted a Malayan Tiger and the group chat immediately lit up with photographs taken from unhelpful angles. Nobody was reflecting on the geopolitics of conservation.
A couple of us jumped off ‘Canopy Jump’ - a leap off a 20m platform, catching the surrounding sights through an exhilarating free fall. We were all just happy.
There is an argument that this is the whole point.
Exploria
Exploria was lighter still — more play than contemplation. The team leaned into it. Games, interactive stations, the kind of place where professional adults rediscover the specific joy of not being professional adults for an afternoon. I watched colleagues who spend their days entertaining tourists and guests professionally, quite seriously become genuinely competitive over something involving animals and a touchscreen. Mandai has clearly understood that wonder, for most people, needs a little scaffolding.
Bird Paradise has three thousand birds from four hundred species. The engineering required to make all of this work — to keep it alive, on an island that cleared its original forest to build itself — is, when you think about it, deeply Singapore. We cleared the jungle, built a city, made a fortune, and are now carefully reassembling versions of what we cleared. Because jungle, curated and made safe, turns out to be an excellent product.
Mandai is majority-owned by Temasek. Of course it is.
But the animals do not know they are part of a tourism strategy. They are simply living. And the team, for one afternoon, were simply living too. There are worse ways to spend a Thursday.
Go. But go knowing what you are looking at: sixty years of national will, compressed into a wildlife reserve — and somehow, still worth the wonder.
