It really IS a jungle out there!

A couple of weeks ago, I watched an elephant lumber down our street in Bangkok. He was led by a Thai man dressed in ordinary clothes, and there were no other signs of a parade or circus. Everyone acted as if nothing extraordinary was happening, and I probably was the only one watching in amazement. Bangkok's modern, urban environment had lulled me into forgetting that much of Thailand really is a tropical jungle. The reality of the "wild" environment outside of Bangkok became more apparent during our visit over the Christmas break to Kanchanaburi, a town located about a 2-1/2 hour drive from our apartment.

On the first day of our visit, Doris and I departed our resort, located on the River Kwai, and traveled in a well-worn 4x4 to the "Tiger Temple," a nearby conservation project run by Buddhist monks. The project rescues wild tigers from poachers---typically poor Thais who yield to the temptation of earning $2,500 from the sale of a dead tiger to buyers interested in their teeth, pelts, blood, etc.

Our tour of the temple started at the buildings housing the tigers, where posted signs ("Dangerous—don't turn your backs to the tigers!") removed any possible impression that the pacing animals behind the bars were just ultra-large, friendly cats. Then, a litter of cubs was turned loose to play among the visitors, volunteers and supervising monks. They tumbled around and growled with all the menace they could muster, and Doris and I carefully petted them, all the while bearing in mind the experience of Gretha, a Danish woman we had met the day before at our hotel. Gretha had proudly displayed to us the arm bruises and serious puncture wounds she had received while playing with the cubs during her own visit to the Tiger Temple. While she felt the experience had been well worth the wounds, her description of efforts to stop the bleeding and disinfect the bites had made us a little more cautious than we otherwise might have been.

After the cubs were returned to their cages, out came the adult tigers. The monks organized several of them into a walk down to a quarry. This gave the tigers an opportunity to exercise, and shade and drinking water were waiting for them at the bottom of the quarry. Along the way, Doris and I accepted invitations to pet the tigers. Petting a tiger bears virtually no similarity to petting a household cat. It feels more like stroking a scrub brush, and when you're done, your damp hand bears the pungent odor of tiger sweat. We naturally had our pictures taken doing this—see the sample photo below. And no, the following pictures aren't composite images created with photo-editing software---they're the real thing.

Speaking for myself, I confess to questioning my sanity! The tigers were huge, and the instructions provided by the monks ("Stand only beside or behind the tigers, never in front of them, and don't crouch—or they will attack you!") provided no reassurance. More than once during our visit, I thought about Sigfried and Roy, and the kind of surprise a supposedly tame tiger can spring. I'm not sure we would have wandered among tigers anywhere but in Thailand, where the cultivated peacefulness of the Thai people seems to influence and calm even the jungle beasts.

Once in the quarry, we had more opportunities to interact with the tigers, and I'm inserting below just a couple of our many photos.





To round out our mini-exploration of the jungles of Thailand, we visited an elephant camp and went for an elephant ride, as shown below. The ride turned out to be pretty much as expected, except for how much the platform on which we sat shifted from side to side as the elephant walked. Neither Doris nor I seemed to be sitting directly on top of the elephant's back but rather were balanced precariously over each side. This produced some anxious moments even on level ground, such as when the elephant lowered his head to uproot and eat some bamboo. When the elephant headed down a steep incline, though, that's when Doris and I really began hanging on for dear life. It's a looooong way down to the ground from the top of an elephant, and I started making disaster plans, such as, would I be better off falling into the thorny undergrowth or aiming for a pile of elephant dung to cushion the impact?!

Finally, a word about what Kanchanaburi and the River Kwai are most well-known for: the building of the famous bridge by POWs while being horribly mistreated by the Japanese in WWII. As you probably kn0w, this was portrayed in the award-winning book and movie "The Bridge on the River Kwai." We learned that the novel and movie were "based on a true story" but certainly didn't adhere to it faithfully. The POWs involved in the bridge building have denounced the book for inaccurately portraying the events and characters, and the bridge itself was destroyed by allied air attacks, not blown to smithereens by a heroic demolitions expert as described at the end of the fictional account. Even the name of the river itself was changed; it's actually the River Kwae" (pronounced "kway"). One of our tour guides shrugged her shoulders and said she didn't know why it was changed for the story, but that most Thais had adopted the revised spelling so as not to confuse tourists. Local sites of historical interest that are, in fact, genuine are the "death railway" and the related museum and cemeteries. We visited these and contemplated the many thousands of prisoners, both Western and Asian, who died in forced labor while building a railway through the jungles of Thailand to support the Japanese war effort in Burma (now Myanmar). These visits were sobering experiences, and we left determined to remember the atrocities committed here, despite the fact that the POW camps have been replaced with tourist resorts.