I had heard a lot about this being a place visitors love. Well sign me up to that list! It’s been great. The temperature has been manageable, some nights we’ve even slept with the air con off. One morning was a cool 17 degrees!

 

The flight up here from Krabi was great. Followed by a quick Uber to our apartment and falling straight into bed as I did not feel well. A fever and dehydration took me a couple of days to recover from, I couldn’t eat much but sculled the rehydration sachets my doctor had so kindly given me before we left home.

 

On Friday I finally felt well enough to Uber into the central town to see a monument and grab dinner. Hawaiian pizza was all I could manage.

 

On Saturday we went to a mall, which was ginormous as seems to be the norm here. By then I had worked out the little boy had lost the spacer to his asthma inhaler and spent my time at the mall pacing the pharmacies looking for one, with a picture of it on my phone in one hand and the inhaler in the other hand!! I failed unfortunately and will have to keep looking, but his asthma has been under control without the inhaler thank goodness.

 

That afternoon we decided to go up a mountain to visit a temple called Doi Sa Tep for sunset. You have to fill a red truck with 10 people before they’ll take you any where. So we sat, a German girl arrived, yay half way! Then 2 Korean girls arrived, that’s 7, we sat, we waited, we looked at our watches, sunset was getting closer…..Finally one Korean girl and I negotiated with the driver a 20 baht discount for each person and he would wait for us until 7pm so we could see the sunset. Winning. It would have been a lovely view if Chiang Mai got its pollution under control! But there was beautiful sunset light reflecting on the temple.

 

The next morning, we were up early with great anticipation, it was time to spend the day with elephants! I had researched extensively. I knew we did not want to ride and didn’t want any nasty hooks, we were not going to support any abuse to the animals at all. I knew I wasn’t keen to go where there was heeeeeaps of people. So I had found a place online and had been into their offices on Friday to book, pay and run all my requests past them. They passed with flying colours. Elephant Nature park here we come. Except we weren’t going to the actual park we went on a ‘saddle off’ tour.

 

The van arrived to collect us at 8.30am, and when the van door opened I was stoked to see only 4 other people! Plus our driver and a guide. We were off to a great start. We drove 1.5 hours south, then transferred to a ute for another 20 minute drive. We had finally arrived. As we changed into the clothes that were provided, 2 beautiful elephants came down the paddock towards us and as they got closer we noticed a baby was with them also!

 

We learnt that these animals, all female, had only been freed from riding camps 3 months ago. The adults were 38 and the baby was 4. One adult was pregnant, she’d been pregnant for a year….with another year expected to go! It was time to give them some love, so we got straight into feeding them sugar cane, then we were given bags full of mini bananas to carry and took them for a bush walk with their handlers ‘mahouts’. They sure knew what was in those bags! Elephant trunks came nosying around, looking for food if you weren’t paying close attention!

 

After our lunch we made them rice balls and left them to set while we took the elephants to the mud pit and smeared mud all over them! Then it was time for a play and wash off in the waterfall for everyone!!

 

The kids were amazing. Mr 8 was all guns blazing, his new BFF was the guide, he sucked out any detail he possibly could, if you know our boy you’ll know he will chat your ear off if you let him!! He was in his element!

 

Little Miss 6 went between excitement and fear. She almost had a few mishaps like when she almost fell in the water, and almost got squashed when an elephant backing up and she didn’t realise or when she held onto the banana too long and the elephant got too close to her and she didn’t like it (sometimes she did like it🙄) but with 2 parents, a guide, a driver, 4 tour buddies and 3 mahouts looking out for her when she made frightened noises somebody scooped her up! Needless to say, once we transferred back to the van she used her Daddy’s arm as a pillow and slept all the way home!

 

A truly memorable day with plenty of photos and GoPro footage taken for everyone to remember it by.

Budget update :

Chiang Mai – $82 under
Total budget – $260 under