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 you exactly which classic supermarket products have unsustainable palm oil in them. You learn how simple shopping choices can help preserve the tiger's natural habitat, and you can then send emails directly to Australian manufacturers demanding better. At the time of writing, 143,000 emails had been sent, and many retailers have made a switch as a result.
