Continued...

It was lovely and the food was gorgeous, plates of beansprouts with tofu and vegetables, stir fried vegatables and a chicken dish with pineapple in a kind of sweet and sour sauce with a bit of a kick. Delicious! Unfortunatley our guide had to hurry us along as time was getting on and there was still so much to do. When we'd booked we went for the trip with the most activities in one day (all the more time for shopping!) and our itinary was: Cemetery, Museum, Bridge, train, lunch, elephant riding, a trip to some water falls and the Tiger Temple. This seemed like no problem when we booked it but I think we had thrown a slight spanner in the works! It involved us having the fastest Elephant ride ever ( the poor elephant was more shocked than we were!) being ushered back to the mini bus and being driven speedily to the waterfalls where we had 10 minutes to climb up and see it while the rest of the group waited for us! Then we headed off to the Tiger Temple. This is advertised as a Temple that works as a Tiger conservation project and basically you can touch and pet semi tame tigers. None of us really knew what to expect but we were all excited at the thought of being able to get up close to a real live tiger. The reality was a slightly bizzare set up. You head off to Tiger Canyon and as you walk round the corner you find yourself in a kind of amphitheatre surrounded by rocky walls, the atmosphere is hushed and there are about eight huge, beautiful Tigers with chains around their neck placed in a kind of circle. They are so laid back and in typical feline fashion don't really care what's going on as long as they're full and comfy! You have to wait in a queue and then you get a guide who takes you by the hand and leads you safely around the tigers, they show you where you can stroke them and you have a few seconds with each tiger. You are absolutley not allowed near their heads and they are distracted if they try to look at you. Any Tiger that is not sleepy or pacing you are not taken near. You can only go round the back of the tigers and often find yorself staring at a huge pair of hairy testicles (they're striped too!). But it is an incredible experiance and there is something so special about tigers. They are so majestic and tolerate the whole thing with that self satisfied aloofness which anyone who owns cats well knows! Then we went off to see the rest of the project which included two really cute tiger cubs. There are litters of warthog running round whilst the mothers wallow in cool mud. There was a small heard of water Buffalo with some very impressive horns, and some very tame deer and goats who you can feed advocados to. All the animals were well fed and happy and it was a nice end to a lovely day.
Yesterday we got the sky train to the weekend market in Chatuchak Park. It is immense! After hours of walking round, and spending even more money, we had barely scratched the surface! The prices are amazing and you just can't help yourself! It soon got too hot and too crowded for us so we decided to head to the shopping centre for lunch and our air-con fix! Then we went to the cinema to watch Charlotte's Web! Then we got ready and went out for tea heading to a really nice place that we'd watched the Ireland-Scotland match at the night before. They'd said the England-France match was going to be on so we were looking forward to that. Whilst watching, a group of people sitting at the tables outside got out their guitars and sang everything from the Chillies to the Carpenters which was wicked and to top it all some guys walked passed with the cutest baby elephant ever! Only in Bangkok!

Bangkok, Thailand