Bangkok Day Two: Tiger Temple

This is from day two of Arie's trip to Bangkok. You may want to start at day one.

After the floating market, we asked our driver to take us to the Tiger Temple (and to make sure he understood us, he did an amazing tiger impression). We didn't know a lot about it; we had seen an Animal Planet special about a bunch of monks who adopted baby tigers, and figured that that seemed like a good place to go. Our driver had some trouble finding it, but after asking directions a few times, we started seeing signs that said "Tiger Temple".

Arriving at the temple itself was exciting. There was a gift stand that sold plain brown shirts, and a sign next to it saying that anyone wearing "hot" colors (red, orange, pink) would not be permitted to get too close to any tigers. That sounded promising.

The Tiger Temple is actually "Wat Pa Luangta Bua Yanasampanno Forest Monastery". It's still just a regular monastery, but they're saving up to build a special tiger enclosure (with admission, you get a little booklet that shows projected floor plans for the tiger enclosure (the booklet also has tiger poems)).

We arrived at about 1:50pm, and the brochure said the tigers exercise from 2pm to 5pm in the canyon, so we figured they were still in their cages--we went there first. The cages did have a couple of tigers (and a leopard), but the real attraction was a box with baby tigers in it (it's hard to imagine anything better for a box to contain). They were very small, smaller than housecats, and they were asleep. They may have been dreaming about hunting, because they kept twitching their paws and moving their mouths.

There were a number of other animals in the area as well--a wild boar and her newborn, some horses, some random cows. I guess the monastery accumulates wild animals.

I hung around the baby tigers for a while hoping that one of the monks would sense my natural tiger affinity and let me hold them, but it was not to be. Not disheartened, I proceeded to Tiger Canyon, hoping there might be more tigers in it and that maybe I could play with them.

Sure enough, Tiger Canyon was a well-orchestrated tiger petting zoo. At the bottom of the canyon is a large, round clearing, and half of it is fenced off. In the fenced-off half are five or six sleepy tigers who are chained to posts in the ground. I guess tigers are at their sleepiest in the mid-afternoon, because most of these guys were either asleep or clearly wanted to be. There was a line of tourists (it wasn't too crowded). I got in line, and thirty seconds later a staff member (whose job title, according to his badge, was "Tiger Boy") took me by the hand while another took my camera and followed, and I was sat next to tigers and told I could pet them while they took pictures.

It was probably the greatest thing anyone has ever done in the history of doing things. The tigers didn't seem particularly interested, more like sleepy, except at one point one of them did whack me surprisingly hard with his tail. The tigers did move around a little, but the staff seemed to be in control--at one point, one of the tigers roared a bit and growled at a lady who was stroking him, but they held her in place so she didn't run (presumably that might have triggered a hunting instinct) while they calmed the tiger down. One of the Tiger Boys did keep hitting the tigers with his hat, but they didn't seem to mind.

That's my hand in that photo. Tiger Canyon was surprisingly well-thought out for a tourist attraction in the middle of rural Thailand run by monks. The entire time that you're in the fenced-off tiger area, there's a Tiger Boy or Girl holding you very firmly by the wrist (except during photos) so that you can't do anything stupid. Their brochure says that only once has a visitor been injured, and not fatally.

The trip home from the temple was a little rough--our taxi's battery died at a gas station and we had to wait almost an hour for roadside assistance to give us a jump. The one car that stopped for gas refused to jump-start our car, which really surprised me--in the United States, no one would have refused. I had car batteries die on me a couple times out in rural Tennessee and upstate New York, and everyone was always eager to help out.

That's it for my Tiger Temple adventure. My trip to Laos, coming soon.