"Mae Taeng Elephant Park Excu ..." a Chiang Mai Travel Page by DarkRay

Forget about those places that just offer elephant shows. Mae Taeng Elephant Park is the real deal in Chiang Mai! They trained their elephants very well and each trainer definitely have a very strong bond with their charge.

Before I go on further, do be advised that some animal rights groups are against the sometimes harsh methods which the elephant camp use to train their animals. So form your own opinions and decide for yourself if you want to go or not.

One thing for sure though is that the tourist dollar definitely help to maintain the upkeep of the animals and while I was there, I did not see any of the harsh punishments being applied. For the elephant I rode, its trainer could amazingly, just control it by his voice command.

The entire event started at 9am by viewing how the trainers bath their elephants, followed by a short segment showcasing some unusual skills of the elephants, such as kicking a soccerball and painting.

Then it is a 45 minutes ride on the elephant to Lisu Village (an entirely fake high-hill tribes village consisting of nothing but gift shops).

At Lisu Village, you will then take a 30 minutes ox-cart ride back to the camp for your buffet lunch at their restaurant.

After lunch, you then have the option of whether you want to take a bamboo rafting ride as well.

In the bamboo rafting ride, there are 2 rafters on the same raft as you who will be doing the actual rafting. The passengers basically just sit and well, enjoy the nice scenary. I did tried taking over for a while, but seriously, bamboo rafting is really much harder than it looks. ;-)

On the way back from Mae Taeng Elephant Park to Chiang Mai City, our tour guide brought us to the Mae Sa Snake Farm, which is the largest snake centre in Northern Thailand.

The show consisted of their snake handlers showing their competence in handling Thai cobras, pythons, and some sort of tree jumping snakes. It was an entertaining show and they even showed how they extracted the snake venom from the Thai cobra.

Being a tourist spot, there were ample opportunities for all visitors to take a photo with a python, should anyone be interested ;-)

I dunno what to say about this, except my tour guide obviously brought me here hoping that my friend and I would spend some money here. The butterfly farm was really tiny, and the Orchid farm was not that interesting as well. I did buy something for my mom though..... ;-P