10.02 Day 26 Chiang Mai
Day 26 - Saturday 10th Feb - Chiang Mai including Day Trip
First time this trip (?) an alarm has been set as we’re due to be picked up by a minivan between 7-7:30am. The alarm gives me the 20 minutes I need to walk back to my ol’ faithful market to get some fruit for the day ahead along with some mango sticky rice for breakfast. Travel sickness tablets taken (Kate & Seb), the minivan picks us up the shuttles around the Old Town until we reach our quota of 12 passengers.
I’m fairly sure our guide and drivers names are not Rainbow and Big, but that’s what we are told, so we stick with it. After 40 minutes heading South West we pull in at a service station, which must be thrilled to have been chosen because there is an array of vans just like our own, all making the same pit stop for 7/11, bakery, coffee everyday.
The day is split in 2 - visiting elephants and Doi Inthenon - the national park containing the highest peak in Thailand. We tackle the latter first driving to the park - which like most other attractions has an inflated two stage entry - buy your ticket from desk, walk 4 steps, have the ticket stamped by someone else, and enter.
Up and up we start driving, ears popping several times as we zip around corners occasionally overtaking a slow moving car. We’re in convoy with another minivan and the drivers talk to one another over walkie talkie. We know there was a hike involved but thankfully after being dropped off at the start of the Pha Dok Siew nature trail its uphill for only a few minutes before dropping down alongside a river and its waterfalls.
Seb, as on our own walks in Sydney, likes to be at the front, but he does at least cede to the guide who’s been picked up from a local village. The lush rainforest opens out to dry paddy fields from where we spot 4 gibbons swaying in the trees. We weren’t sure how the kids would go, but they marched to a great beat, it was more the other end of the age spectrum and concerns over knee joints that caused any hold ups.
Glad we’re doing this in the morning before it gets too hot though. We arrive in a village and are given lunch - coconut soup, chicken, vegetables, omelette and rice with fruit for dessert at an early 11:30 am followed by a tea and coffee tasting to perk everyone up.
‘Big’ had driven the minivan down to this point and it took only a disappointing matter of minutes to repass where we’d been dropped off 2.5 hours earlier as we made our way to the top.
Getting to the top of Tanzania (and Africa) on Mt Kilimanjaro took a 4 day hike. Getting to the top of Thailand took 30 minutes in a minivan, and we had about a 150 metre loop walk to the highest point at 2,565m (to give Kili its due, it was more than twice as high at 5,895m). Other than a shrine, and somewhat confusingly 2 different signs each proclaiming to be the highest spot there isn’t much to see as it’s still all covered in forest.
However 15 minutes back down the road there is more to see in the form of the Twin Pagodas on two hill tops facing each other, a brown one for the King, and a light purple one for the Queen. There are impressive views into the valley from the King’s side, whilst the slope up to the Queen’s pagoda is covered in a spectacular array of flowers and contains another flower garden behind it too.
It’s then a much longer than expected drive through the National Park, down down, round and round, then heading down more and more sharp bends, switchbacks and chicanes all done at a fair clip, the roads obviously familiar to the drivers. We finally reverse down a small dust track and our pair of minivans disgorge their passengers, and finally by 4pm we see our first elephant off in the distance.
It’s clearly an organised set up, but infrastructure lite: we sit at a long table in an open sided hut for a spiel on the 5 elephants here, ages from 5 to 40, all female, one rescued from a landmine accident on the border, a circus for another. They have 25 acres to mooch about in and each their own mahout, with them all the time. The bamboo fences are no match for them if they decide to lumber out though.
We’re each kitted out with a navy denim top and satchel with bamboo and bananas inside. Then for an hour or so it's a free for all - wandering to different elephants offering up the snacks. Of course the elephants know what’s afoot and try to poke their wiry-haired trunks into the satchels.
They’re all very placid but move deceptively quietly and quickly, sometimes arriving unannounced behind you. The guides encourage you to stand close for photos but our wearing flip flops makes you add a degree of caution - not that trainers would help if they stood on you, but in regards to one's own agility.
A bit like the snake holding back on Day 1 in Bangkok, Seb is a bit nervous to start with, but warms into it. Whilst we wait for others to empty their snack satchels, Sienna and Seb become agitated, wanting to go back to the first hut as there are two 4 week old puppies lolloping around. They’d spied them on our arrival and were holding them whilst we received the initial talk.
Changed into swimmers we troop down to a nearby stream, 3 of the 5 elephants following us. Armed with a plastic bowl each, water gets thrown over the elephants before they decide they’ve had their fill and they lumber out rejoining their friends.
In the final wrap up, Sienna and Seb are again playing with the puppies - Kate and I wonder if the kids would have been happy to see puppies alone and foregone the elephants. We suspect only half way home would they have piped up asking when they were going to see elephants. We don’t leave until about 6:30 pm and the sun is soon set as we begin the windy journey home.
It was great to be so close to those gentle giants in hopefully a non-obtrusive way. Hopefully we don't look back on this in a few years and discover the opinions have shifted further on this type of activity. It's all set up, but hopefully the elephants are doing ok from this type of interaction. Time will tell. Hard to reflect on the journey though as the repeated sharp bends are too much for Seb so we have to pull over for him. Thankfully he’s not sick but an ongoing stomach ache means he and I get dropped off with the first passengers and after 30 minutes rest in an unknown hotel lobby, catch Kate and Sienna up at Kitti Rose via a taxi. We’re not home until almost 9pm and everyone is suitably exhausted.