Tiger Kingdom, Phuket

It’s a beautiful day for a monsoon.

We came to Thailand to spend mornings cruising the shops & afternoons at the beach soaking up the sun, with a few day trips out to the islands. Instead, over the last two days Nathan & I spent sulking in the hotel room because the weather report shows torrential rain for the next week, brilliant. We’ll be lucky to get a day of sunshine, we checked prices for flights to several other countries but they all seem to have bad weather too.
The only exciting thing that happened was we saw a man walking his baby elephant on the beach & we got a massage last night. Although that felt more like we were getting beaten up!

Today we decided that how ever much we sulk it’s not going to change anything, so we got up early for a day out. Not sure where to go or doing what but we were up at 8 & down at the buffet breakfast stocking up on a delicious fruit salad with pancakes on the side, drizzled with honey.

We got the taxi bus into town & had a quick walk to Patong beach. It was horrible. Grey storm clouds towered above us & as far as the eye could see. The wind was strong & the ocean looked murky. To be honest, we both got more of a tan in Ireland that we’re getting in Thailand! We head back to the giant shopping centre via the little shops on the side of the road, I was zig zagging from shop to shop on either side, like a kid in a candy shop wanting to buy everything! (Not wanting, because I did buy everything!)
We gave haggling a go today, first buy was a bag for 500 baht, which I got for 200. Nathan’s first buy was a keyring penis for a friend (Mum don’t tell Taz but it’s for him!) the guy wanted 50 baht for it, so Nathan offered him 40. His response was "No, 50 baht keyring with balls, 40 baht no balls" So Nathan paid him the full price.
I did the haggling from then on.

We spent the next few hours buying a few items & cheering ourselves up. We found a large shopping area under the Jungcylon shopping centre which was great! You could haggle, everything was cheap & there was no rain.

Around midday we got a tuk-tuk to the Tiger Kingdom. I was unsure about going because I’ve read a lot of reviews online about how animals are mistreated in Thailand and it really upsets me, but this place said that it doesn’t drug the animals. We paid a man 400 Baht ($10ish) to drive us around for the day so he waited for us whilst we spent the next two hours there.
First stop was a pretty average lunch & some more rain, whilst watching a tiger poop in its swimming pool. Then we waited about 90 minutes before we were able to go in. I expected one or two tigers, but there was easily ten of them in cages all around us, along with four adorable cubs, they were magnificent. We paid to go in to see a medium sized tiger straight away, it was wondering around the cage so the man tapped it on its bum, said a command in a gentle tone & it jumped straight back onto its bed. It tilted it's head down & hid its face with it's paw like a dog being told off & feeling sorry for itself - it was cute, for a deadly animal.
I was so nervous when it came to my turn, took me a little while to get the courage to touch it, but it was an amazing experience. The tiger wasn’t bothered about us being there, but in the back ground we could hear two full grown tigers ‘play fighting.’ It looked so vicious as they dug their teeth into each others skulls and they threw each other around on the concrete floor. Their deep roars echoed through the building, it was incredible, I’ve never heard anything like it.

We spent about 20 minutes here & the weather decided that it was time for us to go.

We walked out & the tuk-tuk man was waiting for us by the door. On the way back Nathan told me to move closer to him whilst sitting in the back seat of this beat up vehicle because he was scared we were going to roll. The tuktuk was struggling to accelerate & just as he said it we broke down on the side of a hill.
“Tuk-tuk-roll-prep!” I shouted, now also nervous that we could actually end up crashing or rolling. We took our tuk-tuk roll positions buy placing both feet firmly on the seat in front of us, digging out bums & back into the seat, grabbing onto the roof railing with both hands & braced. After another break down on another steep hill & doing around 30kph the rest of the trip we finally got dropped back to our hotel & gave the driver a 10 baht tip hoping he’d save to fix his tuktuk, which he was grateful for although it was only about 30 cents!

As we walked up the steps out of the rain we heard a loud crash behind us. It sounded like a small branch had fallen, all the staff ran over so we jumped back out into the rain to see that two large trees had ripped out of their concrete blocks & fallen onto the car port! Roots & mud flew everywhere! Their carport was smashed in half & a tree blocked the road. Luckily no one was hurt and there was no damage to any of the cars.

We finish our lovely rainy day with movies & chocolate.