Elephants, Hippos & Giraffes! Oh My! - Chiang mai Zoo

Zoo Day has finally arrived!!! I had heard rumours about Chiang mai Zoo, mostly regarding how you can feed the Hippos and Elephants. They were 100% correct!

We arrived nice and early at the zoo and paid our 10THB to park the bike (later finding out that you can just ride it through the zoo… but thats ok, it was a lovely walk!) and then our 150THB entrance fee and off we went. The Zoo is located just at the bottom of the Doi Suthep-pui national park and so is set amongst beautiful forrest scenery.

It didnt take us long to locate the hippo enclosure. I’m glad we came early as it was already getting busy (it seems the feeding of the hippos was high on most peoples zoo agenda!). All up there were four hippos, including one absolutely delightful little (relatively speaking) baby, who seemed pretty content following the largest hippo (?mummy hippo) around and geting well fed from all of the visitors (honestly who could resist such a cutie!).

(The largest Hippo)

Mitch went first… paid his 10THB for hippo food and off he went… I must admit I was a bit nervous, having never been so close to a hippo and reading about how aggressive they can be! But it was fine. The come up and stick their heads out of the water, open their mouths and wait for the food to be dropped in :)

Next it was my turn! I loved it! so much so that I couldn’t resist feeding two of them, first was a big one and then the baby (so cute!)

Next we went on a mission to find the elephants (coming across some giraffes and other animals along the way). The first elephant we found was a large male that they had seperated from the other elephants in the large enclosure we found later on. He was friendly (and hungry) and seemed to enjoy when Mitch was teasing him a bit!

From here was just wandered around the zoo, got lost a bit as its not really the best laid out zoo, watched an animal show (all in thai, don’t really know what was going on) and then found some more elephants… There was two in the large enclosure, a large male in a holding area at the back and a smaller female pacing around… she seemed quite sad and at one point tried to hit Mitch with her trunk when we got too close! In the end we think she just wanted food and as soon as we fed her she seemed much happier with us (well she no longer tried to hit Mitch…)

We finished our day exploring by attempting to ride up the mountain to the Doi Suthep Buddhist Monestary with a stop at a waterfall along the way where we found bugs for sale (to eat) and a sign “NOW OR NEVER”… I choose never

Our attempts to get to the Doi Suthep were destroyed in the end by the torrential rail we encountered so instead we headed to Burmese Resturant & Library for lunch.

(Eggplant Curry)