Hearing a Tiger’s Beating Heart
✈ Chiang Mai, Thailand
January 2010
Sometimes, there is just nothing you can do to prevent your primal instincts from fighting their way out, and you’ll end up in a fight-or-flight type of scenario, with trembling hands and a pumping heart. Traumatic at times, but highly exhilarating at other times – preferrably when the situation is entered into at your own free will. Jumping in a parachute is one of those things. Being locked into a cage with three live, awake, fully grown, unrestrained and not at all sedated tigers is another!
Being accompanied by only a couple of guards, armed with foot-long sticks, I’ll have to admit I seriously feared the predators would pick up on my scent of pure terror, and snap into kill mode. I’d be mortally wounded in a second.
