|| Thailand Part 1 ||
Thailand is probably the first international trip for many Indians. Even though it was the 9th country for me, this trip was quite exciting for me because my cousin was joining me on this trip and this was his first international trip. Having done a lot of solo trips in the last few years, I was also looking forward to having company on this trip.
We had a red-eye flight from Kolkata and landed in Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi International airport at 4:15 AM local time. Since we already had a sticker visa, we headed directly toward immigration and then took a bus to reach Pattaya. The Tiger Park in Pattaya was our first destination of the day, the first destination of the Thailand trip and the most awaited place that I eagerly wanted to visit in Thailand. You get to enter inside a tiger enclosure - each enclosure has two tigers and you can actually touch and pat the tigers. There were, of course, a lot of Do-s and Don't-s that we had to keep in mind and had to sign an agreement before entering the enclosure. We were very scared, nervous, tense but excited and thrilled at the same time. Many a time I asked my cousin if we should do this or was it very foolish of us to risk our lives? But we were very keen to try this and having flown all the way from India and having come so close, we just couldn't surrender now.
Tiger Park was very exciting. It will go down as the most daring thing that I have ever done so far! From Tiger Park, we went to Pattaya Floating Market which was just opposite this park. The concept of this floating market is similar to the Meena Bazaar on the Dal Lake in Srinagar, except that the shops are connected with each other by wooden bridges. So you don't need to take a boat but walk and explore the entire place. This was a nice place to shop for souvenirs for our friends and family back home.
We headed back to the hotel after that because we couldn't check-in early in the morning. So we had to take some rest and freshen up. After a short rest at the hotel, we left to explore a local night market and the famous Pattaya Walking Street. More of this will be shared in the upcoming posts. If you wish to see my travel vlog from my first day of my stay in Pattaya and how thrilling the Tiger Park was, please watch my YouTube video from my Thailand playlist, the link of which is shared here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGA9m9JqP8WpLl4jYyugq3l6gDT88jDGK
