We booked an all-day excursion on our first full day in Chiang Mai, which is in northern Thailand. We joined ten other travelers in a mini bus and drove 2.5 hours up into the mountains for our first stop – the Meaklang Elephant Sky Camp, a small sanctuary harboring elephants rescued from circuses and lumber camps. After washing our hands and donning blue denim shirts, we were each given a bag full of bananas and sugar cane – treats for elephants. They said the elephants were used to the blue shirts as each tour group wears the same ones. As soon as we started walking towards the elephants they came running eager for handouts.
Our group was assigned a group of four female elephants. The oldest was 45 and had come from a lumber camp before those were shut down. She was big! She was used to drag trees through the forest to the rivers. The other ones were 13, 8 and 3. The 3 year-old was named Lisa and the 8 year-old was her sister, they had lost their mother.
The elephants would hang around you as long as you kept feeding them. As soon as you stopped, they would move on to someone else. The elephants are kind of characters, and would try to sneak snacks from my bag if I wasn’t giving them enough attention. To feed them, you held the banana or sugar cane stick at the end of your hand and they would wrap their trunk around it and take it from you. You could also say a phrase (kind of like bon bon) and they would open up their mouth and let you put the food right on their tongue. Lisa was a cutie and a bit of a rascal. She liked the bananas more than sugar cane. If you gave her a sugar cane piece, she would take it but keep it in her trunk or casually drop it and ask for more hoping you still had a banana in your bag. If not, she’d soon look for someone else.
After feeding them, it was time for their bath in a pond. We followed them there, and those who wanted to could join them and splash them with water which they seemed to enjoy. We had worn our swimsuits in anticipation of this, along with a change of clothes. They enjoyed being splashed and rolling around in the mud. Sophie even made friends with a cow who wanted in on the action.
This experience was more fun than I thought it would be, and it was the highlight of Thailand for Sophie so far. Seeing elephants up so close was amazing. You could sense that they are intelligent and social creatures. After rinsing off and changing, we had a nice lunch of PadThai and watermelon on picnic tables in the shade of the sanctuary.
Our next stop was the highest point in Thailand, coming in at 2565 meters which is 8450 feet. It was part of the Doi Inthanon National Park which contains one of the few original mountain jungles left in Thailand. We then stopped at the nearby Phra Maha Dhatu Naphamethinidon and Naphaphonphumisiri Pagodas (yes, easy for you to say). These were built high on the mountains in 1987 and 1995 by the Thai Royal Air Force and Thai citizens to honor their king and queen’s 50th birthdays, respectively. The Thais seem to really love their kings and queens! You had to climb up many sets of stairs to reach each pagoda (or take the covered escalator as we did). The pagodas were surrounded by flower gardens and great views of the mountains. It was a little hazy in the distance, so you could just make out the mountain ridges.
Our next stop was a mountainous jungle hike led by a member of the local Karen Hill Tribe. There were several different Karen and Hmong tribes in this region between Burma, Laos, Cambodia and Northern Thailand. A subsection of the Karen tribe are the long-necked Paduang tribe (the women put rings on their necks to stretch them), but we didn’t see them – nor did we want to. Our guide led us deep into the mountain, often following little irrigation channels that were used to irrigate rice paddies on the hills nearby. The rice was harvested in November and it was now the dry season, so we didn’t see any rice growing in the paddies we walked by. The path was pretty steep up and down in places, and we had to cross little bamboo bridges in some spots. But, we were rewarded by arriving at the Pha Dok Siew waterfall, a ten-level waterfall cascading down the mountain. On our way back down, our guide pointed out a green pit viper snake sleeping in a nearby tree. It was really hard to see!
At the end of our hike, members of the tribe prepared some different coffees and teas for us to try that they make there. For many years they grew opium, but that was abolished and they now grow arabica coffee which is well suited for the mountainous terrain. They supplement their income through tourism by leading hikes and selling their coffee and handcrafts. Covid was very hard on them as well since there were no tourists.
After that we made the long trek back to Chiang Mai. On the tour we met travelers from the U.S., Canada, Norway and New Zealand. Sophie and I sat by two very polite and imaginative New Zealand brothers who were 7 and 9. They kept us entertained on the ride by their conversation with each other about worlds they were inventing (mountains made of ice cream that you could sled down on chocolate cookies, and things like that.).
Back at the hotel, Sophie and I ate at a nearby restaurant where I tried the local specialty called Khao Soi – a yellow curry dish with both crispy and soft noodles. I liked it a lot. Sophie had a spicy papaya salad. We got ice cream bars at the 7-11 for dessert. We were very tired by the time we got back to our hotel room. We took showers and went to bed, Sophie thinks I fell asleep before my head hit the pillow.
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