Day 2- The thrill of the tigers

I was really excited about visiting the White Temple. I have heard that the White Temple is truly beautiful and after Googling photos of it, I was convinced it is one of the most beautiful temples ever.

And indeed, it was.

The White Temple was breathtakingly beautiful. It seemed to be gleaming in the sunlight and it looked simply magnificent and glorious. The interior of the temple was also rather unique. There were paintings of famous people and icons like Michael Jackson and superheroes like Superman. While these were rather intriguing, I could not help but wonder whether these paintings were put up after the temple started becoming more popular among tourists. I understand that the aim of the paintings are to show the contrast between good and evil, but somehow, to me, at least, paintings of Michael Jackson and The Incredibles do not fit into a place of worship.

We were actually planning to interview the monks there but we were unable to do so as there were only two monks in this particular temple and they do not do any work around the temple. Instead, they meditate and talk to small groups of people. Hence, we felt like their input, while definitely insightful, might not be relevant to our project. Thus, we decided to interview the secretary to the owner of the temple. He offered much valuable information and shed some light upon the changes that are currently happening or have happened in the temple due to the influx of Chinese tourists visiting the White Temple.

We then left for Chiang Mai and on the way, stopped at a rest stop. While busy shopping, we managed to get an interview with an employee there who was really fluent in Mandarin. We wanted to find out the reason why he learnt Mandarin and whether or not the growing number of Chinese tourists had some influence on his decision. He mentioned that he learnt Chinese after realising the bulk of the customers are Chinese. This happened to be one of first few instances when i noticed the actual impact of the growing number of Chinese tourists.

Our next stop upon reaching Chiang Mai was the Tiger Kingdom. There, we interviewed one other Chinese tourist who informed us he was inspired to visit Chiang Mai after watching the movie Lost in Thailand. As a Communications student, it really made me realize the powerful impact of the media on people and helped me appreciate the various lessons that I have learnt so far in school. We then proceeded to interview Peter, our tour guide, who provided extremely important narratives of Chinese tourists behaving inappropriately. We deeply appreciated this as so far, we have been receiving rather positive feedback about the tourists and getting Peter’s side of things provided a good balance.

Of course, after conducting the interviews that we wanted, we watched the tigers at play for a short while. My group and I were busy wondering how the tigers were so tame and we came to a conclusion that a row of their teeth, either bottom or top, must have been removed so that they prove to be less of a dangerous threat to human beings. I couldn’t help but to feel bad for the tigers as I feel humans have no right to treat them as such simply in exchange for the ridiculous thrill of taking photos with a tiger.

After the Tiger Kingdom, we returned to the hotel and immediately set off again to look for a Chinese language centre in order to carry out a possible interview. Unfortunately, the one we were intending to visit was closed and another that we found seemed rather unwilling to be interviewed. However, we found a tour agency owned by a Chinese national instead. We conducted an interview with him and then returned to the hotel for dinner.