Tuesday, January 28, 2014

The Tiger Kingdom

Tiger Kingdom is a park that is home to tigers ranging in age from newborn kittens to fully grown adults. Visitors are able to actually enter the tiger's pens to take pictures and interact with the tigers. Each age range has its own pen for the tigers to run around in and play. A large staff of caretakers raise the tigers and act as guides to take people into the cages.

We ate an extraordinarily spicy dinner while waiting for our turn to go inside the pens and see tigers up close. When we finally went inside it was about 5:45 p.m. and the park was closing at 6. And the tiger's feeding time is 6 p.m. So with the nine month old, younger tigers we were fine, but the big ones were getting kinda antsy and hungry. The guides who accompanied us repeatedly warned us not to touch the big tigers and to be very slow and careful when approaching them. You have to carefully creep up on the tigers from behind to take pictures with them, and this was especially important when they were hungry and tired at the end of the day.



It was exciting to be walk around in a cage with 5 fully grown tigers romping around wherever they want to go. After finishing with pictures, we continued to walk around the park. We walked up to the nursery where the baby tigers are cared for, and the handlers opened the window so we could easily watch. They were feeding milk to the little mewing kittens with their faint but aggressive snarls and whimpers. And every time they set the new kittens on the tile floors their feet would slide out from beneath them because it was so slippery. It was so adorable to watch the little ones! I really wanted to hold one of the babies, but we didn't get to unfortunately. Well after six p.m. we tore ourselves away from the babies and headed back into Chiang Mai.


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