PHILIPS ANIMAL GARDEN
My 9 year old is an animal freak and would do just about anything to be around animals as much as she could. After discovering that Philips Animal Garden was somewhat of a "mini-zoo", I knew we had to go there.
Philips Animal Garden is open from 9-5pm and the cost is $10 for adults and $5 for children. They give you a bag of cut carrots (per person) to feed "only the animals with 4 legs please".
This place is located in Alto Vista (near the Chapel). We had a fun time getting lost everywhere we went and it brought nothing but laughter and jokes the entire 10 days we were there. Today wouldn't be any different. No matter how many times I studies the google earth map prior to leaving, without an actual map of Aruba with us and no street signs/names...then the lack of signage...you're bound to get lost. However, it's super easy to navigate and sooner or later you'll find everything and manged to stumble upon things you weren't even looking for: SCORE! Once we located a sign that said "Philips Animal Garden", it put smiles on our faces because we were surprising our daughter with what we were doing that day.
I knew that it wasn't a big place (and someone's house I believe?) and that it didn't take long to look at everything. However, I was pleasantly surprised with just how big it was. I didn't picture it to be this big or this nice actually. It's very nicely laid out and landscaped and I also noticed that they do more than just the animal farm and also do things like tours as well (of Aruba, not the animals).
The animals were cool to interact with and we all 3 loved this place. While it might not take very long to walk along and look at all the animals, I'm pretty sure we probably stayed longer than most. I'm guessing maybe 1 1/2 hours to 2 hours we were there. We took our time. Both my daughter and I were busy taking pictures. We really enjoyed it.
This howler monkey was very vocal today. I had never heard one before and it was pretty crazy.
I highly suggest checking this place out if you are an animal lover (both children and adults) and you want a different experience than you would get going to a zoo.