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Today is the day I've been lookin it's at to for a while, visiting elephants and tigers! We choose to do the same trip as Lauren and Shane as they said the animals were all well treated and the general experience was good! This meant we had a private car and guide for the day, which was good as the trip was around 3 hours to the boarder of Thailand and Burma. First st op the bridge over the river ????. This was an added bonus for the trip, as I've always heard about it and also I know tony would love to have been here to see it! It was quite impressive and we got told all the information and history about it by our guide. After a short walk along it we headed back to the car and onto the elephant park - 45 minutes later and we were there. As you walk down the stairs to the reception area you instantly see loads of elephants, we were quickly shuffled along as within 5 minutes we were on a chair on the back of an elephant! The ride was amazing, slow, smooth and a lifetime experience. We walked through some wooded area into a small village where the trainer (manmout?) introduced us to his mum and she fed the elephant some rice and water and we were back on our way. The elephant kind of followed the route but would stop to eat some leaves where it felt like - at one stop the trainer picked some small fruit from the tree and stuffed them in his pocket, we assumed it was for the elephant but down the road a little bit he started to shove handfuls in his mouth, he offered us some and said they were like lemons, so we had a nibble on one and they were majorly sour! All about trying new things ha!
We then arrived back to reception where we changed into swimmers and jumped on the back of the elephant, this time no seat! We walked down a steep bank into the river, unfortunately we didn't get to wash him but his trainer kept making him swim and splash us which was really funny! We then headed back and had some lunch and we were off again to tiger temple!
When we arrived we were amazed as we walked up the path to see around 8 tigers just chilling around some trees chained up with their trainers next to them. The staff were quite intense but we understood as you will never be as close to tigers ever, and if they didn't want to be chained up they could easy break free. Quite scary and exciting and exciting at the same time! Then it was time to walk the tiger, we were lined up and took it in turn to hold the lead and walk it, this was really scary to start with as you are holding a huge tiger on your own. This lead us to a large open pen were they brought all the tigers down too, including their famous tiger who was in a coupe of films and music videos! When they were all there we were lead around by one of the trainers to have photos taken with all the large tigers of all size and ages. By the time we were done we were really hot and were ready to head back, but we still had to feed the cubs. After, what seemed, a long wait it was our turn and a group of 8 of us walked up to the pen where they were. No picture or words can describe the first moment you see the tiny 8 week old cubs.! I spotted one of the really tiny ones which couldn't be much older than 6 weeks, and as soon as she said we could play with them I headed straight for that little b*****! The small ones were so cute but too hot to be playful, the slightly larger ones were more playful and soon were jumping around playing with there toys. The 45 minutes went really quickly and it was time to feed them, we got one of the larger ones who couldn't get enough if the milk we were given! Watching them stumble about with milk around there chops was really funny. Unfortunately it was time to go after that. Another three hour car journey home and we were back in bangkok. We had one last beer at the bar, a walk on kohsan road and we were ready to check out tomorrow for our trip the first Thai capital - Sukhothai!
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