Elephants, Tigers and Butterflies…oh my!

Our second day in Chiang Mai was really epic.    [WARNING: Lots of pictures ahead!]

First thing we did was ride elephants through the Thai jungle. I was so excited! I’d never been that close to an elephant before. They are truly amazing creatures. So gentle and majestic. They were just awesome to be around. There was an adorable little baby (3 years old) that was so fun to watch. He just liked to follow his mom back and forth. So cute! The elephant we rode was named Sahli. I had the chance to feed him a bunch of bananas. I fed them one at a time and he ate them like it was nothing. I saw another elephant grab an entire bunch, maybe 10 bananas, from a girl with his trunk and ate them all at once, peelings and all!

Baby Dumbo
Feeding Sahli bananas

Big foot lives

After the elephants we got to go ride on some oxcarts. They were slow and pulled by an ox, of course you know.

Here come the oxcarts, oh how slow…

Then we went to an orchid farm and butterfly conservatory. We saw some awesome and unusual butterflies!

Butterfly in the sky, I can fly twice as high
Cocoons
Mmmm, that smells nice

Doug and I found a tiger refuge and just had to go! It’s a place that raises tigers and allows people to interact with them. They have around 30. The tigers are brought up around humans since being cubs, so they are tame. They don’t use any sedatives or drugs on them, they are just trained from a young age how to act appropriately with humans. We still had to be very cautious and follow specific rules because these are jungle cats. It’s always sad to see animals in captivity, but in this case it’s much better than the alternative; poaching is a really big problem in Asia and these tigers wouldn’t stand much of a chance in the wild, which is heartbreaking. But, on the bright side we felt so lucky we could spend time with these incredible and gorgeous animals. A definite highlight of our trip and life!

Upon arrival, we had to choose which size of tiger we wanted to see: Big, Medium, Small, Smallest. The smallest and biggest had a huge wait so we choose “small” thinking that they would still be, well, small. Boy were we surprised when we got to the cage!

"Small" Tiger, 8 months old
Here kitty kitty

They were so fun to play with and watch. They act just like regular domestic cats, except they’re huge! The employees even had giant kitty toys that were exactly like something we’d buy for a house cat but it would be 10 times bigger. The tigers would wrestle and play with each other and were so sweet.

Back-scratch

After our turn with the “small” tigers we walked around and saw all the others. The “big” tigers were just incredible and really really big! When we made it over to the “smallest” cage it took me one glance and I told Doug we had to go buy tickets to see the little guys. You’ll understand why once you see the following shots. Best 15 minutes of our lives!

A face to die for
Jenny just crawled right into my lap on her own accord! I'm obviously ecstatic
Sleeping tiger
Tigers just wanna have fun

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