Day 7 - Safari World!

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Day 7 - Safari World!

Ok, so whoever came up with the idea to drink all night at the boxing and then get up for a 7am tour pick up is a fucking idiot.......oh hang on.......that was me lol!!!!! Family hating me at this point, everyone cranky, but I was like,hey, we are going to feed giraffes!!

So we drag our tired (hungover) arses up and race down for a bit of breakky before the bus comes to get us. It was an unfortunate tour booking, all I really wanted was a driver to take us to the friggen zoo and back, instead we got an officious woman trying to dictate every moment of our visit there. None of us like her lol, she was a pain in the arse, at 10am we do this, at 10:20 we do that blah blah blah. We tried our best to lose her but she kept coming back!

I am conflicted on Safari World. The kids fucking loved it, I booked it for the kids, I didn't like it so much. As soon as we got there I was uncomfortable, it's not like the animals looked much more uncomfortable in their pens than they would in a zoo in Australia or the US, and it's not even that I haven't before seen the animal shows that all the tourists were cheering at here.......I guess it's just I have more awareness now. We saw the same shows here that we have seen in San Diego, and similar conditions for the animals. Again I say, the kids loved it. I am glad that they did, at the same age I loved seeing animals I'm not familiar with too. We got to feed giraffes little bananas, and that was absolutely the best bit about the whole day. The giraffes seemed to have a big compound and they were definitely keen to eat the little bananas that we held out on sticks. Weirdly, when we came into the park, there was a litter of kittens and their mother hanging around at the entrance, which was also a place where enormous parrots hung out.......not the usual way a zoo would work! But cat and kittens and parrots all seemed to just hang there. Bit weird.

So we go in, and we see some animals, and then the first show was an orangutan show, the Indian tourists that seemed to be the big drawcard people at this place loved it. The best bit was that there were vendors with cold drinks and fans everywhere, it was WAY hotter up here than it was in the city. So we watched the very cheesy and weird mokey show and then were ushered over to the sea lion show, that was also cheesy, but not quite as bad. After the second show there was a third that we were supposed to attend but we decided to lose the group and go exploring on our own instead. We had seen some tigers earlier and Kalyb was totally keen for a picture at the tiger enclosure......so we set out with a map that leads to nowhere and a bunch of signs within the park that seem to continually lead you in the wrong direction! We asked a few staff member who in retrospect definitely had zero English and just pointed us in the direction they thought we wanted to go! It was cool, we didn't find the tigers at that point but we did go through some other areas that clearly weren't on the tour program......look at us rebels haha. So at lunch time we went to the restaurant we were supposed to go to for our buffet lunch and had a strange combination of food. It was good, but weird combination of western food and curies. Not even Thai curry, Indian curry, we figured out by the end of this day trip that Indian people are probably the target audience of this place.

After lunch we came out through this fake forest corridor where people were standing with perches and birds. Now, anyone who knows Todd knows he is not keen on birds. Earlier in the day he had hung in the doorway of the aviary and then raced through to the other side without standing in it at all. So Todd walks past the most enormous eagle I have ever seen and says, I want to hold it. I am stunned and willing to pay the 500 baht immediately (like $30), so he holds the big bastard eagle for the photo and then of course Corey wants to hold the little owl and Kalyb wants to hold the big owl. So yep, then we are all in the bird enclosure holding birds that out in the wild would send these boys screaming lol. I held a cute little owl and the big owl did a massive big poop over Kalyb's arm while he held it lol. All in all, satisfying, and great photos.

So then we went searching again for the tigers and finally found them! Crawling under the concrete into the little perspex house inside the tiger enclosure was a little freaky. There was no air in there and it made me insanely claustrophobic to even go in there, Todd couldn't come in at all and I didn't spend long. The tigers weren't keen to visit near the perspex house at that time anyway. The reason we hadn't gone in there the first time is because there were idiots in there who were annoying the tigers, banging the perspex etc and the tiger was actually attacking the house thing, the tiger is huge, no way was I letting the kids in there at that time, he could get through anything if he wanted!!

So when we were coming back to the 'meeting place' for the dolphin show we saw the people sitting and taking photos with the baby tigers. This is Kalyb's dream, and he must do it.......I have to admit I am a little keen to pat these babies myself. So we pay a big amount and the 2 boys sit with the tiger first, and then Todd and I sit with him. I hold the baby bottle and the baby kitty in my lap was sucking and sucking on the bottle. Yes I feel bad for animal exploitation, OMG I got to hold a little baby tiger and feed it from a bottle!! This is why tourism destroys ecosystems I guess. Again in my defense, this place looked no worse than other zoos I have visited.

Last show of the day was a dolphin show, again, kids loved the shit out of it, the dolphin trainers seemed to love their animals and stuff. Same show we've seen before with the dolphins. It was all a bit the same. Anyway, after the Safari Park was over, we jumped back in the crowded mini van (again, my mistake for booking this as a tour! Should have just gotten a taxi!) and we headed home. It was long and hot and crowded and shit. Annoyingly so.

When we got back to the hotel we had to decide whether to nap and rest or push on and have some dinner. We decided to just get our shit together and walk up the road to a pub that Todd and I had seen on our dinner cruise the other night. Called Ken's Steak House it had a lot of Australian paraphernalia out front and I think after a week in Thailand we were all a little keen for something familiar and for some Aussie people. We didn't have that, at all, but the place was awesome anyway! We were pining for home, but this bar on our street was great anyway, all kinds of crazy imported beer that Todd wanted to try and some great food, we all went with some comfort stuff and had hamburgers, except for Corey, who is eating his way through the spaghetti's of Thailand. The culture shock has maybe been a little gradual and crazy, tonight we wanted burgers in a pub......it still wasn't quite like home, though the food was good, and the company was too! Li was the pub manager and he was awesome, we talked a lot about great beers, and he took photos of us to put on his pub wall, and we took heaps of pics in his awesome pub. Best part of Thailand so far......meeting the awesome people who want to talk to us. We still can't speak Thai very well at all, even the basics! But all of us have adopted the new way of making ourselves understood to people who don't speak English as a First Language. I am liking it more and more, takes an economy of words, and you have to do some thinking to make yourself understood sometimes!

Anyhoo, we had some crazy drinks, because Todd thought it would be a good idea to order 'doubles' since it was so cheap. And we managed to convince Li that Kalyb is 20 years old, the first guy that has asked. So not sure if I have mentioned this before, but Kalyb just turned legal at home, just to travel to a country where you have to be 20 to drink alcohol. We have had no trouble whatsoever getting him a drink, the question is asked almost cursorily. No ID has ever been asked.

We went back to the narathiwas after out dinner and drinks, and figured we had better organise our ride for the next day with Pui. After some negotiation and weird call back conversation we worked out that Pui would com for us the next morning after breakky. After out negotation we all wend downstairs for a swim.....the Narathiwas pool is still fucking cold, no matter how hot and tired you are! Todd and Corey attacked me while I was on the stairs and forced me right in, and it was for reals COLD! I jumped in the heated spa not long after. Soooooo good. The pool had almost been ours alone the last few nights, but tonight it was pretty crowded. High season finally in focus I guess, still all ok. Good day, good swim, our time at Narathiwas is almost at an end, we really liked it here!

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