Our first footsteps on foreign soil in 2024 took place in the Dutch city of Rotterdam, a city we’d first visited about eighteen months earlier during a stop at the Netherlands on Island Princess. We’d very much enjoyed Rotterdam’s architecture, museums, and the views along the Nieuwe Maas at the time and knew that this was a city we’d barely scratched the surface of so we were keen to get off and explore some more.
We’d looked ahead of time for other things to do that weren’t quite in the same area as those we’d visited before, even though we’d skipped out on several museums and art galleries back then owing to time constraints. We certainly could have retraced our steps and visited all new places on this trip to Rotterdam but decided to do things a little differently and see a little more of Rotterdam as a whole. That would mean a Metro ride because the first thing we decided might be nice to look at was the zoo. Zoos have their critics but each should be taken on its merits because many do good work for conservation.
Now, if you get off your cruise ship in Rotterdam and head straight towards the Erasmus Bridge then you’ll pass the entrance to Wilhelminaplein station and you can board there but there’s a little known law if you’re visiting Rotterdam by cruise and you’ve got a website or social media presence on which you want to brag about your travelling lifestyle, and that’s that you must take a picture of your cruise ship from the bridge. We did this, as you can see below.
We could then have walked back to the station but decided we might as well walk a little further on to the next station instead, Leuvehaven. It wasn’t that much further to walk. There we picked up a couple of Tourist Day Tickets and you can see what that included in the photo below. Basically, buses, trams and Metro trains (not overland trains), plus the water bus, in both Rotterdam and The Hague (and we might head to The Hague next time we visit here just to check that out). The ticket lasts until the last transport of the day of purchase and isn’t a rolling 24-hour ticket so you’ll get the most value from it by buying and using it earlier in the day.
We emerged back into the daylight at Rotterdam Central and from there effectively followed the animal print trail in the direction of the zoo.
I like architecture without being any kind of expert in the field, and I like going on cruises where maybe my knowledge of lines, ships, itineraries, and histories is actually a little better than most. It’s nice when you can combine some loves in your life, like spotting houses in a terrace incorporating balconies spanning bay windows of adjacent buildings on the ground floor, each balcony being separated by a divider very much in the style of cruise ships. It looks like late Art Deco influence here from the Streamline Moderne style.
A sculpture of an athlete then caught our eyes. This was Fanny Blankers-Koen, the most successful athlete at the 1948 Olympics in London with four gold medals. The bronze sculpture was erected in 1954.
Now to the pictures from Rotterdam Zoo. As you can see it was an overcast day so the photos aren’t as bright or colourful as they could be, and as you’ll soon discover there’s not a lot I can really add from this point on. The photos will mostly show animals in the zoo. I’m not about to go into the types of animals or give you information about the species. All I will say to start off with is that this was a very big zoo, spaced out, with large enclosures for the animals within. We didn’t see any signs of stress anywhere and that’s not been true of some other zoos we’ve been to in the past.
We spent a long time watching the primates below and that’s mostly because of the baby present. It was lovely to see it being passed from adult to adult while grooming took place.
In other zoo visits over the years it’s become a running joke that the Red Panda is my nemesis, often remaining perfectly still until I raise my camera in its direction at which point it will either turn around or move behind something, the end result being my wife laughing hysterically. Got it this time, though.
Rotterdam Zoo included an aquarium area and we do like an aquarium so we had to take a look at that too.
Finally, a couple of species that my wife adores for some reason: penguins and tortoises. The penguins were ridiculously large and quite menacing in a way.
We didn’t see everything there was to see at Rotterdam Zoo but suddenly realised we’d spent hours there and far longer than we’d expected or intended so decided to cut our visit short in order to get some other sightseeing done. Rotterdam Zoo is right there with the best of zoos that we’ve been to and we’d be more than happy to make a return trip there one day.
In the next post in this Aurora cruise travelogue series we’ll head down for a walk around the historic area of Delfshaven.