I signed up with Tours With Tong for the VIP Tiger Temple and Elephant Swim, and I have never made a better decision! This post is a break down of Part 1 of the day at the Tiger Temple. 

The day started at 4:30am when the tour guide, Kung, and the driver picked me up in my Bangkok hotel. We went to the Bridge over the River Kwai and watched the sunrise. 

Next was to provide donations to the monks. Buddhist monks do not go to the grocery store or cook for themselves, so they rely on donations for food.  The Tiger Temple started in 1994 when someone turned in a tiger cub orphaned by poachers. Once the surrounding villagers heard about this, they started bringing more orphans for the monks to care for. Now they are pretty much raised at the temple, cared for by monks, volunteers and staff. 

 Next up I got to bottle feed a 4 month old tiger cub. I'll let that sink in for a minute....

The tigers are so focused on the bottle they don't pay attention to much else! 

Next we walked the tigers back to their enclosure; this guy was about 11 months old but still intimidating!

Next up was tiger bath time! 

With 148 tigers at the temple, they go through about 400 cooked chickens per day. I was lucky enough to feed the tigers one. I was surprised how gently they took it!

If you want to talk about memories of a lifetime, this would be it! They put you in the tiger enclosure with no cages or chains. You play with the tigers like you would a house cat, dangling toys in front of them. It was amazing to see the power of these animals.

From there we walked the adult tiger to the big cat enclosure. I was truly in awe of how big he was. 

Just a little snooze....

For the last stop, they put the tourists in a cage and let the tigers play in the water. They loved jumping in the water and wrestling each other!

In my effort to travel ethically, I did a LOT of research on this attraction. I found it to be a lot better than the Tiger Kingdom in Phuket, which seemed to be much more commercialized. I read lots of reviews saying that the tigers here were drugged, but in my honest opinion, they were NOT. First of all, tigers are nocturnal, so they like to sleep a lot during the day. I also saw no mistreatment from the staff and the most corrective actions I saw were merely redirecting the tiger's attention when they started to focus too much on the tourists. You need to remember these tigers were raised in this temple with people, so they are much more used to the interaction. They still got kind of riled up at times, but there were lots of rules to keep tourists safe. For example, how to approach them, when you could have more contact, how to handle them, what you can wear, etc. 

If you are interested in going to this temple, I highly recommend Tours with Tong for your guide. Kung knew the best places to stand for photos and to get the best mannered tigers, she held my purse so tigers wouldn't want to play with it, took 700 photos of me, and brought me ice cold water. Traveling in late November and being a native of the desert, I still got seriously dehydrated, so be prepared for the heat.