For Thursday the plan was to do the animal shows. We had more of a late morning, as we left the hotel at around ten for the 30 minute drive to the crocodile show. We paid Yisrael for the driver, but each show had it's own admission that we paid there. Besides for the tigers, I remember it all being fairly cheap, between 20 and 100 Baht.
We arrived at the crocodile show a bit early, and a woman was there to show us around. She took us to a few random animals, and insisted that we took pictures.
"Here bunny, you take photo!". I was afraid to say no, so here's a picture of a bunny:
There were a few other animals including a large lizard that she placed onto us without asking, as well as large enclosures with tons of crocs of different sizes.
The main attraction was obviously the massive crocodiles in the center enclosure. The only other people who showed up for the show were two Japanese teenage girls, and once they got there the show began. The announcer/commentator/DJ lady kept on playing a remix of the Pokemon theme song, which the girls seemed to love so she kept doing it. The show itself was pretty entertaining. It was exactly as you'd expect, a seemingly insane Thai man jumping around with the crocs and putting his head in their mouths. The sound that the big ones made when they snap shut was incredible. He stuck his hand down their throats a few times to search for lady boys, as he explained. He didn't find any.
After the crocodiles, we went to the Chiang Mai Monkey center which was right nearby. This was the first place I felt uncomfortable, as when you walk in there are monkeys chained to posts with tiny lengths of chain, so small that they couldn't even make a full circle around their poles. They instead paced back and forth in half circles the entire time. We went to the performance area, where the show had already begun. They had a few monkeys doing several different routines, including playing basketball, and counting. I didn't take a lot of pictures as I just felt bad that I was supporting something where the animals were clearly unhappy.
After the show the monkeys went around to take selfies with the crowd.
I'll finish up the rest of this day in the next post. Thanks for reading!
