rtw with lucy

I’ve always prided myself on being a good mother–I have always loved and protected my girls to the best of my ability, and have even been known to turn into a mother bear on occasion.

Which is why I don’t quite understand my recent actions of this past week. Yesterday we went to a tiger temple for heaven’s sake. This is a tiger sanctuary where a group of Buddhist monks take in orphaned tigers and fix their wounds, then keep them and raise them in captivity for the rest of their lives. The tigers are supposed to be quite tame, and they certainly look tame at 2:00 in the afternoon on a day hot enough to qualify as a Missouri summer. But one can’t get around the fact that their paws are as big around as a mans upper thigh, and their head is bigger than a man’s torso. All they’d have to do is take a playful little swipe to put you into the hospital.

And then there are the warnings: Don’t wear red, pink, or orange. Don’t let in more than 4 people at a time to visit them. Don’t squat down or do anything to make yourself look smaller. Stay well back when they are walking back to their cage and be very quiet.

So I did what any mother would do. I let my children go in there and pet them. Am I crazy?!!!!

We visited a city called Kanchanaburi in Thailand. It was really one of the best places we visited. There are several things of interest in this town. First of all the town is infamous due to the Movie “The bridge over the river Kwai”-this town has a museum and cemetary related to the prisoners of war who were forced to build the ” death railroad” tracks from Thailand into Burma during WW2. The Japanese held the prisoners in camps under deplorable conditions and many many American,Dutch,English,Australian and Asians died during the war. The JEATH museum gives a history of the Japanese brutality. We were at the museum at the same time some Japanese tourists were there. Some went through in a big hurry(guilt?) and one Japanese lady seemed very overcome with emotion. We took a ride on the train that goes over the bridge and into the hills for about two hours. The scenery was beautiful and the trip made more meaningful knowing the history of the rail line. I would suggest this train trip for anybody visiting Thailand. Now about the tiger temple, outside of Kanchanaburi is a Monks temple where you can visit and actually pet full grown tigers. The monks have taken in abandoned and injured tigers and are developing a breeding program so that the tigers may be released to the wild. There is a small canyon where they take the tigers and chain them. Visitors are taken one by one(holding hands) with a trainer and are allowed to get down to tiger level and pet the tiger and have pictures taken. Crazy as it sounds it seems safe but we were still nervous about letting Erin and Lucy do it. But we did and below are some pictures. The complex also has other animals and one time a day the monks throw out food in the street and hundreds of cows,wild pigs, horses, peacocks,barking deer,goats all feed together. The strange zoo is also expanding and eventually there will be natural habitat for the tigers to run free in. We did enjoy the experience- we had read stories on the internet that the tigers were drugged and not very well cared for but we did not observe this. The tigers were lazy and mostly laid down but cats do this anyway in the heat of the day- nothing out of the ordinary. Tiger temple is grrrrreat! Gene

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