Orn's Travel Blog

We have just been loving life here in Chang Mai.  First of all it is great to return to some sort of organization after Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos.  This time around we really notice how much better off the Thais are – both in terms of organization and money.  Another great thing that we were really missing is the Thai food.  Being back to fantastic red or green curry, tom yum soup and other fantastic dishes is just great!

The first day in Chang Mai we just wandered around the city, trying to get our bearings.  On the second day we decided to take a tuktuk to the Tiger Kingdom, a park with about 30 or so tigers.  We had very mixed feelings going in, you never know how the animals are treated and how things work.

The deal is that you can come and have a peak into one of the cages and then you can buy 15 minutes with one (or many) of four different age groups – newborns, “teenagers” and adults – with the newborns a bit pricier than the others ($15 vs. $10).  We thought long and hard if we wanted to do this, we had seen that if you go in with the adults you are not really petting them, more approaching them from behind and tap on them and it felt very strange to us and not worth the experience – except maybe just getting the thrill of standing next to an adult tiger.

So we opted for seeing the baby tigers since we were there and just to sum up – the experience was amazing!  Once we came into the enclosure where they were kept – by the way they were three 6 weeks old kittens – one of them just ran to Elínborg and right into her lap and he stayed around us the whole time.  The kittens are a bit tricky because they just go where they want and we were not allowed to hold them, fetch them or anything – just be there and if they wanted to play then we could play with them.  Those ten to fifteen minutes with Kankoon (Jack Fruit) were just wonderful and so much fun!

After seeing the baby tigers we were allowed to walk around the part and see the other tigers (through the fence) and what amazing animals they are – so graceful and elegant.

After the whole visit we felt really good and had no second thoughts.  All the animals were born in captivity, they seemed very healthy and well taken care of and seemed happy to us (without a degree in tiger psychology though).

Well this has been long enough, I’ll just post about the Jungle Flight experience tomorrow.