Animal Adventure Park

Tourist Trap

By Christopher Minster

Animal Adventure Park is a sort of mini-zoo/animal show about forty-five minutes from the big hotels in Punta Cana. It’s relatively new and is still pretty small: it’s not really open traditional hours, and you can’t just show up, pay, and get in: they send a couple of vans around every morning to the big resorts and pick up whoever wants to come. When they get there, you pay and go in, but pretty much stay in the group and move from attraction to attraction.

There’s a lot to do at the Animal Adventure Park, about half of which is included in the roughly $40 entry fee. You get to see the trained birds and sea lions do their shows, and they’ll bring out the tigers so you can watch them eat. You can also get your photos taken with the birds and large iguanas. The park, naturally, will try to sell you prints at the end of the day, which cost $10 each.

Most of the cooler stuff, like the swim with sharks or sea lions, costs extra. There is a “touch pool,” which is a smallish, star-shaped pool full of starfish, sea urchins, and whatever else they have at the moment that is small and harmless. When I went, there was a baby shark in there, but baby sharks turn into big sharks, and he may even be gone already. These extras cost an average of $20-25 each.

All in all, a visit to the park is entertaining, but expensive. Someone who wanted to get in plus do a couple of the cool extras could easily blow $100 bucks. This park is best for families with bored kids who are driving them nuts, and who have plenty of money. Not surprisingly, Animal Adventure Park does not list their prices on their web site.

It is impossible to recommend Animal Adventure Park for anyone until they change one of their policies. Once the visit is done, they herd the guests through the gift shop and past the photo sellers, which is annoying but typical, and then put them on the vans. Then, however, the guests who did not pay for any of the extras, like the Swim-With-Sharks, must sit on their butts in the hot vans and wait for those guests who have paid for extras to do them. It is extremely annoying: in my bus, normally reserved German tourists took to stomping on the floor and chanting in unison to try and get the park staff to drive them home…to no avail. It’s not the fault of those who wanted to do something extra, but this flagrant disregard for most of their paying customers for the sake of a few extra bucks is absolutely inexcusable. Until Animal Adventure Park changes this appalling policy, no one should give them their business.