James and Cat’s Jazz-tastic Journey!

So, after our snap decision to stay in Thailand we booked a bus and the next morning were on our way to Kanchanaburi to see the famous Bridge over the River Kwai.  We arrived and checked into a delightful little place called The Jolly Frog and went immediately out to see the sights.. we went and saw the bridge and the nearby WWII museum, which seemed to cover all wars, not just WWII, and had no grasp whatsoever of how to handle the sensitive subject of war.  It’s description of the Atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima was that the “town was destroyed in a jiffy” and there was a statement on the wall written by some Thai historian which seemd to say that yes, the treatment of the POW’s who built the railway and the bridge was indeed terrible but now it brings lots of tourism to Kanchanaburi, so maybe it wasn’t so bad after all!  I don’t know whether some things just got lost in translation but it was the worst museum I’ve ever been in!

Ok, so the main reason for this blog was for me to tell you all about the weird experience that was visiting the Tiger Temple in Kanchanaburi…. so here it goes…

Tiger Temple.  The strangest and most morally confusing place I’ve ever been.
The set up is the monks in a temple not far from Kanchanaburi have, over the last few years, taken in tigers that were formerly mistreated.  They have 26 tigers ranging from 9 years to 2 months old.
So the temple adopted them, gave them a home, fed them, and turned them into a tourist attraction.
You pay 300 baht (about 5 pounds) to enter the site and your first stop is ‘Tiger Canyon’, a small canyon where hoardes of tourists queue up to have their picture taken with the tigers.  You can either have the ‘regular’ photo, where you just stroke the tigers, or you can pay 1000 baht (about 15 pounds) to have a ‘special’ photo where you sit with the tiger’s head in your lap.
We queued up for the regular photo; I was growing more and more uneasy by the second.  When we reached the front I saw my anxiety was justified.  Spread out around the canyon were ten to twelve tigers chained up and sprawled soporific on the ground, occasionally twitching their tails but otherwise paying little to no attention to the masses of people around them.  There are whispers that the tigers are drugged to keep the mellow, though the temple’s explanation is that tigers are naturally nocturnal animals, and when you see them in the afternoon, especially just after they’ve been fed, of course they’ll be dozy.
It almost sounds plausible, but being something of a cynic, I harboured my doubts as to the truth of this.
Each tiger had three or four handlers and when my turn came a guide lead my by the hand to each tiger where she took 3 or 4 photos each time of me stroking them.
I don’t know if I can fully explain the raging battle being fought in my head.
Every fibre of my being was screaming that this was hideously wrong, exploitative in the extreme; why would a temple who claim to look after these tigers subject them daily to mass manhandling by crass gawping tourists?  These mighty beasts reduced to a dopey photo opportunity.
But there was a small voice in my head which I couldn’t silence whispering “But this is amazing!”  When and where else would I be able to get so close as to be able to touch a tiger?  Stroke the silky fur, feel the warmth of their bodies and the slow thud of their heartbeat?  To tickle the belly of a cub like it was an overgrown kitten?  To be so close to such raw power and yet be safe from it? 
My selfish pleasure at being so close to a truly ‘wild animal’ was hard to stifle despite my overwhelming certainty that this was purely and simply wrong.
The temple claim all the money the recieve is being ploughed into the building of an island where they can release the tigers into a more ‘natural’ habitat.
Wandering around the place there was certainly evidence of lots of building work.  One fibre glass construction we walked past was what appeared to be a stage!  Modelled to look like the jungle with three tiers and doorways in the back leading to cages behind.
After what I’d seen in the canyon the purpose of this edifice does not bear thinking about.
The sad truth of the matter is that no matter what ‘natural environment’ is being built to house the tigers, none of them can ever be released into the wild.  None of the animals have even the slightest wariness of humans and would soon find themselves at the wrong end of a poachers gun.
The whole experience left me with a strange mingling of amazment and revulsion.  The tigers are not mistreated; they’re not beaten, and are well fed and cared for.  But does this necessarily mean they’re being treated well?
Not for a long time has my concience been so cruelly torn at and despite my moral outrage, I cannot deny that when I laid my hands on those great cats it was one of the most wonderful feelings I’ve ever had.

James though it was really fun.

Anyway we spent a couple of days in Kanchanburi and are now back in Bangkok for a few hours waiting for a train to take us to the border with Laos, where we plan to spend some time exploring the south which we didn’t really see at all last year.

Tom: The instuctor didn’t actually say don’t open your eyes with contact lenses in but it’s kind of obvious that you shouldn’t as they will just float away.  However, I’m so used to swimming without contacts that it’s natural for me to open my eyes under water.

Susan: We have to go back to India as our flight to Budapest leaves from Delhi.  I really liked India, but Cat had a hard time dealing with the attitude of the Indian men.  Also, it’s pushing 40 degrees and pissing it down there at the moment!  There’s also a few places in South East Asia that we regret not going to last time so now we get the opportunity to see those. 

Diving: I’m going to try and do some fun dives when we’re back in the South of Thailand, other than that I’ll have to wait until we’re in Greece.  I will eventually do the Great Barrier Reef and the Reefs of East Coast Central America, but not this trip!  It’s made the list of things to do before I’m 30!

Much Love
xxx

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 at 4:06 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.