...but not without first doing something that quite franky, we never even dreamed was possible!

We'll put more photos on the flickr but I'm not sure they do it justice. Tigers, large tigers at that. And you get to stroke them. OK so they''re chained and you might even think from the photos that they're drugged but basically between 3 and 4.30ish every afternoon they nap and, helped by the monks who look after them, you can (quietly) sit behind them and stroke their tummys.

It's been a while since I saw this many people just grinning!

if they woke up and went for a stroll, then you just walked past that one. Sarah got first go on a big male that they had waited for 10 minutes to see if would settle back down. The paws, the teeth, just the muscle of these animals and being so close was just incredible.

Where this sits in the moral scale of things god only knows. They are captive bred and critically endangered. A british woman moaned that she had been asked to leave as she couldn't stop her infant child screaming (the tigers are sleeping you stupid woman!!)...does that say more about the British or the general Thai tourist scene???

Oh and we visited floating markets (vaguely interesting) and the bridge over the river Kwai (people doing pop star poses). Restaurants overlook this monument to the suffering of 100's of thousands of POW's and forced labourers so you can sit and sup a Singha. Yet the museum had the best waxwork of Churchill I've ever seen (see Flickr for that treat..)