Tiger Kingdom!

Wow. I just did what may have been one of the scariest things IN MY LIFE. I willingly stepped into a closed cage with many fully-grown tigers. Who does that? Well, people who want some really cool photos do that.

Yes, today we went to Chiang Mai Tiger Kingdom, a place a bit outside of town where, for a mere 30 bucks, you can get a professional tiger photographer to take pictures of you and your friends with tigers of all sizes! We opted for the smallest and the biggest. EXTREME!


The baby tigers were so freakin' adorable!


But they could still seriously eff you up...just look at that face.


Who wouldn't love a couple of baby tigers?
That was kid stuff. I'll admit they freaked me out a little bit cause I know tiger "play" can involve copious amounts of flesh ripping and mangling, but how much harm could little cubs do? Our next stop was worlds more terrifying: the big daddies.

We stood around for a little while waiting for our photographer to be ready for us, during which time it started pouring down rain. So the normally outdoor photo shoots were moved indoors to a series of quite small cages. When your number got called, into the tiger chamber you went. It was obviously nerve-wracking...despite the best training, these animals are still wild and if something were to go wrong, there we are in the cage - easy tiger fodder! We watched a bunch of people go ahead of us, however, and nothing went wrong or seemed weird. Yeah, like going into a tiger's den is a totally normal behavior...

Once it was finally our turn, we headed straight into the cage, got ready to start taking photos...and the tiger started growling and looking really pissed off. "Wait, this doesn't seem normal! It definitely did not do this with any of the other people. What do we do?" we asked the trainer dude. "It's only a tiger!" he replied. Oh...right. SO Jayne went ahead and started to pose with Mr. Grouch, whereupon he stood up off the table, jumped down, and started walking towards us, still growling. WTF. I think we all nearly shat ourselves, and I was close to hysterical sobs. The trainer and photographer weren't really freaking out at all, but at one point they did stand in front of us, I guess as some sort of "protection". The trainer kept saying the tiger was just hungry, and maybe he needed to "go poo poo or pee pee". We were all like "Yeah, let him freaking go! Let's keep the tiger with the foot-long teeth happy!" Eventually, we all got a couple of photos with this cat without incident and moved onto the next one, happy to be alive.


Please don't kill Jayne!


He smells his next meal.


me running away in fear


This one was much friendlier.


sleepy tiger


SCARED! Although the tiger just looks super bored..


I'm spooning a tiger, no big deal.


We were feeling pretty sleepy towards the end, so we decided to use this tiger as a pillow and take a nap.
This was just one more slightly ridiculous and/or dangerous experience to add to the list. Certainly has been quite the trip!

Check out even more awesome tiger-ific photos here. They're GRRRREAT! (Sorry, I had to)