How Do You Get to Khao Kheow Open Zoo, and Is Moo Deng Still There?

The Hard Part Is Getting Back

Getting up to the zoo is easy and cheap. A Grab or a Bolt will run you out of Pattaya in about an hour, and from Bangkok a one-way fare beats anything on this page. We are not the cheap way to arrive.

Four o'clock is when the day turns. The zoo is a long way off the main highway and driver supply out there is thin. At five the gates close and a car park full of families wants a ride at the same minute. The standing advice on the Pattaya forums is to take a Bolt up and agree a pickup time with that driver before he pulls away, tip included. That people bother to say it tells you how well the alternative works.

So the question is not how to get there. It is whether the ride home is arranged before you leave the hotel.

Where the Zoo Actually Is

Khao Kheow Open Zoo is at Bang Phra, in the Si Racha district of Chonburi. It is not in Pattaya, and not really in Si Racha town either: it sits inland and uphill, and the last stretch is a rural road. Road routing puts it about 50 km from central Pattaya, 90 from Suvarnabhumi and 110 from central Bangkok. Some travel sites quote 24 km for the Pattaya leg. That figure is wrong, and following it leaves you an hour behind.

Getting There from Pattaya

Allow an hour from a central Pattaya hotel and a little more from Jomtien. Traffic out of town is the only variable; north of Si Racha the road is quiet. Leaving at seven to be at the gate for eight is worth the early alarm, and every Thai guide says so.

The public-transport version exists on paper and falls apart in practice. A bus from the North Pattaya terminal to Si Racha costs around a hundred baht and leaves you 20 km short with no rank. Chartering a songthaew works, but the price is negotiated and the return gets renegotiated in the car park.

Getting There from Bangkok

Around 110 km, an hour and a half in free-flowing traffic and closer to two in real life. Leaving between seven and nine adds thirty to forty-five minutes before you reach the motorway. Ignore the train: routing engines offer Lat Krabang to Bang Phra at near four hours, and Bang Phra station is still not the zoo.

A block of hours within Bangkok can run out to Chonburi and bring you home the same evening, so the zoo is a normal booking. To see the zoo on the way down and finish in Pattaya, book a one-way block from Bangkok instead, at ฿2,800 for 8 hours in a sedan. With no stop to make, the corridor between the two cities is a fixed fare and costs less.

What a Day with the Car Waiting Costs

Two blocks fit a zoo day that starts and ends in the same city. The price is for the whole car and the driver, tolls and fuel included, and admission and the gate fee are your own tickets.

6 hours covers a Pattaya day: an hour up, three or four inside, an hour back. From Bangkok the driving alone eats four of them, so 8 is the shortest honest booking and ฿3,000 in a sedan is what it costs. Each hour past the block is ฿400 in cash to the driver and never a change to the quote. The full card is set out under what a booked block of hours covers.

The zoo run is normally sold around Pattaya as a round trip with one hour at the zoo included, then every hour after that in cash at the end. Nobody sees an 800-hectare zoo in an hour. Priced that way a five-hour visit lands near our 6-hour sedan at ฿2,800, with no knowable total until the day is over.

Tickets and Opening Hours

The zoo opens every day from eight in the morning until five in the afternoon, with no weekly closing day. Plenty of travel sites say six. They are wrong, and if you arrive at four thinking you have two hours, you have one.

Admission is two-tier, as at most Thai state attractions: Thai nationals pay a lower rate, foreign visitors more, children roughly a third of the adult price and under-threes nothing. When we read the zoo's own rate page on 9 September 2026 the foreign adult ticket was 350 baht. Treat that as a figure with a date on it, and check the zoo's published rates before you go. State prices get revised, which is why three different numbers circulate online today.

The free shows are included, and bringing a car inside costs a small vehicle fee on top of admission. Tickets are sold online through an official channel; otherwise bring cash. The evening Night Zoo tram tour runs Fridays, weekends and public holidays and must be reserved through the zoo's Facebook page, with no walk-ups.

Is Moo Deng Still There?

Yes. She was born at Khao Kheow on 10 July 2024 and has never been anywhere else; her second birthday was celebrated at the zoo in July 2026. She lives in the pygmy hippo enclosure in the main hippo zone, and ordinary admission covers her.

What she does not have is a show time. The only daily routine the zoo ever published for her is two years old and carried its own caveat that it changes with her mood. She is most reliably awake shortly after the gates open and again mid-afternoon, and she sleeps through the hot part of the day in the water. When the queue builds, staff move people past in rotations. On a weekday morning you will usually walk straight up.

You may also read that the zoo has opened a Hippo Village. It has not. July 2026 brought an exhibition about the project, a 10-rai habitat due to be built after 2026.

Golf Cart, Tram, or Driving In

The zoo runs to around 800 hectares and it is hilly, so how you move around inside matters more than visitors expect. The grounds are split into zones: private vehicles may drive the pink zone, so a car that has paid the gate fee covers a good part of it sitting down. The green zone means walking, the tram or a rented cart. A driver solves about half the walking and none of the rest.

Golf carts hire by the two-hour block with a compulsory insurance charge on top, and the four-seater is the cheaper size. There are only so many, they go early, and reviewers report waits of up to two hours on a busy day. The in-zoo shuttles charge a small per-person fare, well under a hundred baht for an adult, across two services at two prices. They are not free, whatever half the web says, and for a family with a pram the fixed loop beats gambling on a cart.

Is It Worth It?

For most people yes, and the reason is not Moo Deng. It holds more than 8,000 animals across 300-odd species in open habitat rather than rows of cages, and scores 4.5 out of 5 from over 2,000 TripAdvisor reviews. Go on a weekday and arrive at opening: weekends run several times heavier, and on one holiday Saturday the Bangkok Post had traffic backed up more than five kilometres from the gate. The viral peak has passed and weekday crowds are manageable now.

The elephant swimming show, where elephants perform in a glass-fronted tank, draws sustained criticism from welfare groups, and a photograph of it won a Wildlife Photographer of the Year award in 2021. The zoo defends the training as reward-based and the show is still on the published daily schedule. TripAdvisor flags the zoo against its own animal welfare guidelines, and some reviewers call enclosures tired. Against that: it is a government zoo under the Zoological Park Organization, the open habitats are better than most Thai zoos, and it runs real breeding and re-introduction work, including hornbills released back into the wild. You can visit and skip the elephant show. Nothing else about the day depends on it.

Khao Kheow or Safari World?

Different products, and the choice is mostly about where you are staying. Safari World sits inside Bangkok, so from a hotel there it is a short ride rather than a day out, built around scheduled performances with a drive-through loop attached. It closes on Mondays, and a foreign adult ticket runs two to three times what Khao Kheow charges.

Khao Kheow is about four times the area with roughly twice the animals, and it asks more of you: you find them rather than watch them brought out. In Bangkok with small children who want a show, Safari World is the easier day, and we price a Bangkok round trip with the driver waiting from ฿2,000 for that one. Anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard, the question answers itself.

When a Group Tour Beats Booking a Car

Shared day tours run to this zoo out of Pattaya for around 740 baht a head, usually including the entrance ticket, a guide and a ride around the grounds, on a fixed eight-to-two schedule. For two people that is about 1,480 baht, all in. Our 6-hour sedan is ฿2,800 before anyone has bought a ticket. If there are two of you and you do not mind being back by mid-afternoon, book the group tour. It is the better buy and we would rather say so than sell you the wrong thing.

Counting fares alone, the car costs less than tour seats from 6 passengers, because the price is for the vehicle rather than per head: a 6-hour Minivan is ฿3,800 against ฿4,440 for 6 tour seats, and in the car admission is still yours to buy. At any group size the car makes sense when the schedule matters: a toddler who naps at one, or a plan to stay until late afternoon. A group tour leaves when the group leaves.

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