We had spent the previous day shopping for different travel agency quotes. What we found is that everyone does the exact same ordeal and everyone has different prices. If you said "na na na the place next to you is $20 cheaper" (not even knowing there was place next door), they would always drop down their price and give you the "special deal only for you" shpeal. After checking out a half dozen places (thanks to my fearless sidekick), we went with the cheapest option that came with Floating Market, Tiger Temple (begrudgingly), lunch, and transportation to and from the Bhiman Inn.
Since our Bangkok time was limited, we couldn't NOT go out the night before right?! Well that played a huge part the following day, and not for the better. I don't know if it was the lack of sleep, the amount of soda we consumed the night before (and the ensuing dehydration), or the long, hot, stuffy van ride, but that morning was no pleasure ride. And I've driven from Wisconsin to Seattle and back more times than you need to know (I owe ya one Mom n Pops).
We got to the Floating Market first and walked around for a few hours. It was pretty cool except overrun with socks-and-sandals-toting, bucket-hatted, slow-moving, Hawaiian shirt-wearing foreigners. Or these people...
Shocker right? We knew what we were in for. And I don't want to sound pretentious because I'm sure that will be me eventually, just could have done with less of them.
Despite the pounding headache, we enjoyed ourselves at the market. Jammed on some coconut milk. Chatted up some portenyos. Took lots of pics. Overall, pretty solid morning.
And that's where things slowly headed downhill. We originally had the option to only do the Floating Market but figured we were coming all this way out here so we might as well check out some heavily-drugged tigers. How could that go wrong?!
We hopped into a different, equally-toasty van and headed for lunch with a seemingly-14-year old tour guide who spoke broken English. Lunch was awkward. Imagine a wedding with an outdoor shabby banquet hall where no one knows each other, no one wants to know each other, and everyone's generally irritated. Or in other words, an outdoor wedding. Just kidding.
After eating, we walked near the famous River Kwai bridge. Used by the Japanese during WWII to move supplies to and from Burma. It was pretty cool. Had some interesting history.
The main thing that sticks out from the River Kwai area though was our first tiger experience. And it wasn't a good one. Some yahoo was getting his picture taken with a clearly, highly-intoxicated tiger. The guy running the show says to him "don't touch his paws." So the moron immediately puts his hand on the tiger's paw (obviously) and the striped beast quickly puts its large, very intimidating jaws around the guy's arm to everyone's horror! The bossman yells at the dipshit for not listening to the rules tries prying the tiger's jaws from his arm while luring it with a bottle of "sleepy milk". Still don't know how this guy got away with 2 full arms and I still haven't really recovered from witnessing it. I kept thinking of Ian Seuser's joke: have you ever read tiger in the outhouse?............by Claude Balls. It was quite the segway into our next destination: The Tiger Temple of course!
Still quite shaken up, I wanted very little to do with the next stop on the Tour of Doom. Plus, we had heard some pretty nasty stuff about the glorified petting zoos in Thailand. The tigers are stolen from their natural habitat and drugged yadda yadda yadda. The monks who ran this temple definitely knew that people knew about tiger abuses in Thailand and really laid the propaganda on thick. FAQs about tiger treatment riddled the park. You'd like to believe they were telling the truth. Monks lie??? Not where I'm from (monks in Wisco?.....moving on). Needless to say, I didn't do so hot here. The one time I agreed to pet a BABY tiger, he flinched the second I touched him causing me to almost shard my pants. Near poo-on-cotton experience (TMI is a myth). That was the closest I came to tigers in Thailand. For an extra fee, you could get into an area where you fling around a stick with a soccer ball attached to the end and tigers would leap and swat at it. Are you friggin' kidding me?!?!?! Why the hell would you want to do this?!?!?!
You: "Hey Quinn, how'd your face get mauled? You look like Sigfried."
Me: "Oh funny you should ask, I was actually PLAYING AROUND with tigers in Thailand."
You: "Didn't see that one coming."
Me: "Me either."
Not.
On our way home to Bangkok we hit some serious traffic. Our friends B, Chris, Scho, JC, and Liv were all there waiting for us. Talk about Bangkok block...
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