On entering the exhibit, visitors are confronted by ancient temple ruins, which provide a backdrop for a 25-foot waterfall, and by wall of ferns, orchids and bromeliads. Soon they encounter a large artificial kapok tree, which contains a spiral staircase that leads them to the exhibit's second level, where they immediately find themselves in an imitation researcher's hut full of the tools of fieldwork, such as a microscope and short-wave radio. Further still into the exhibit, orangutans can be seen making their way up a fabricated tree into a geodesic dome that tops the second floor. The attraction even includes artificial thunderstorms, which go off like clockwork on the moat in the monitor lizard exhibit, created with fans, lighting effects, sprinklers and recordings of thunder. Children run along the boardwalks, pointing out animals in the foliage and staring at artificial trees and rock formations that seem unimaginably large.
Adults often stand in awe at the scale and realism of the exhibits.
It is safe to say that these places represent a new cultural creation that most people never thought they would see in their lifetime. The people who maintain these exhibits give a number of answers to that question. To hear them tell it, artificial rain forests provide a chance for the public to come in contact with nature or, at least, to observe a depiction of nature they might, otherwise, never encounter. Those claims are epitomized by what the education curator at the Henry Doorly Zoo was shown telling schoolchildren in the Lied Jungle, in a program titled Jungle Under Glass, produced by the Nebraska ETV Network, a public television station. This is just like if you'd walk in the rain forest in South America.