Bangkok and the Tiger temple in Kanchanaburi

With pain in my heart I left Laos and the nice people that I've met there, so a very big hug to Femke, Dave, Jules, Heather and Jo.
Around 5pm I landed in Bangkok and hurried to Khaosan road (the backpackers center) to find a suitable guesthouse and to book a trip to the tiger tempel in Kanchanaburi for the next day before the office closed.
I once saw a documentary of this temple on National Geographic and I absolutely wanted to see it now I had the chance.
More info on http://www.tigertemple.org/Eng/index.php
People get the chance to really get very close to the tigers when they do their siesta after they are tired from playing and being fed.


Of course there are some risks because not all tigers are chained but a lot of volunteers try to keep the risks at an absolute minimum as you can see on the picture above, all the people with yellow T-shirts are volunteers who are used to deal with those magnificent animals. There's also the abbot who keeps a very close eye to the visitors security.
The time you get with the adult animals is limited to only a few minutes for security reasons but a little further we found an area where the tiger cubs were held, 7 in total.
We were allowed to play, hug, pet and enjoy their company as long as we wanted and needless to say that I enjoyed every minute of it.

To my darling girlfriend; one day I'll take you there because I think this really an experience that you'd enjoy maybe even more than I enjoyed it.
This trip that took me almost 6 hours of traveling was certainly worth it and was the perfect closure of a beautiful trip to Asia.