This morning was a rickshaw ride to the nearby Safari Park. As I understand, it is the only zoo and place to ride elephants in all of Bangladesh. The standards of a “zoo” are definitely different than in the US, as we saw Pythons with holes in their cages that made us wonder if they could escape and monkeys that weren’t in cages at all. At one point we saw a father walking through an exhibit with his baby on this shoulders and a water buffalo not far behind him! We were really there just to see the tigers…. Which took almost 2 hours of hot, sweaty walking to reach. When we finally got there, we found this rickety old building that you had to climb a ladder to get up onto the roof to look over this metal sheet and down into the tiger sitting in the cage. At this point our translator told us to be careful because several fathers had lifted their children up to see the tiger, only to accidentally drop them in the cage and have them eaten by the tiger!!!! Can you imagine??? In addition to us seeing the animals we ended up being a bit of tourist attraction ourselves. When we had stopped to rest at one point a group of people came up and started taking Blake’s picture. Before I knew it they had politely moved me out of the way and were putting babies on Blake’s lap and each taking turns posing with him…. Ha, ha, ha…. They must think he’s someone famous! So I guess keep your eyes on facebook for Blake! (They may live in mud huts and cook over open fires, but they all have cell phones with cameras and facebook accounts…. Priorities!)
