One of the best elephant park is Maetang Elephant Park. It is located at Maetaman valley, around 50km north of Chiang Mai. There are around 40 elephants here and 20 ox-carts, and 20 bamboo rafts to provide visitors to check out the most enjoyable activities.
Activity schedule: The excited activities in this elephant park start from 8am to 3pm.
9 am: Elephant taking a bath at Maetang River. The visitors will enjoy with an unseen activity. The mahouts, mostly Kerans, clean the elephants in the water with various styles such as ordering the elephant to lie down on the water. Sometime, the elephants will tease visitors by splash water to them from their trunks. Without notice, the visitors scream happily around the area.
10 am: Elephant capability performance: After taking a baht, the elephants then holding each other tail and walking to the show ground for the next activity.
The show has various such as; elephant pull the flag, elephant dance, elephant kick a ball, elephant shooting a basket ball, elephant pushing and pulling logs, and elephant respond order from mahouts.
11 am: Time to get closest to your friend! The elephant riding is provided at the base next to the show ground. 2 adult visitors can ride on one elephant.
There will be a big and strong seat tied on the elephant back, so visitor should not worry about the comfortable matter.
The elephant will take visitor cross the Maetang River that they take a bath and go straight to the jungle. While riding elephant in the jungle, visitor can sight seeing the trees, birds, and comfortable atmosphere.
In the middle of the way, there will be a small banana shop for visitor who would like to give a prize to their lovely transporter by buying a hand of banana or a bundle of sugarcane to him or her. Don’t forget to ask the name of the elephant you ride in order to call him or her and to keep in your good memory.
The destination of this journey is a Lizu village.
Note: Children under 15 should be accompanied by parents. Visitor who has weight over 100kg should sit single to avoid overload.
After getting down from the honest friend’s back and give him a prize or tip to the mahout, visitors can take time to shop a wonderful souvenir in this village before going to the next activity.
11.45 am: The visitors can go back to the elephant camp by the ox-cart ridding.
Ox-cart is a wooden cart that pulled by a pair of ox. In the past, the ox-cart is using mainly in carrying the agricultural products.
The ox-cart can contain 8 peoples in one round.
12.00 am: It is time to enjoy lunch after felt tried with the activities. Lunch will be provided in buffet. The restaurant is well-organized, the food is delicious, and the service is perfect here.
1.00 pm: The last activity in the program is enjoying bamboo rafting along Matang River to the destination. It take around 45 minutes to get to the destination that the tour bus or visitor’s driver are waiting at the pier.
The raft is made by big bamboos tightly tie together. It can contain around 8 people included two drivers. The driver will stand in the front and back of the raft one by one pushing and pulling the raft to flow smoothly thru the river. There are small wooden seats to provide to each visitor to sit down and enjoy the adventurous journey. The river is very cold and quite obviously clean, but actually it is not as visitor can see that some time there is elephant dung flowing pass by their raft. But this is the natural thing.
Tips:
1. Visitors will be taken a photo while riding the elephant and sitting on the bamboo raft. And the picture will be printed and put into a photo frame that produced from elephant dung. No worry about the smell and clean as it was produced in a good process. The frame with visitor’s photo will be provided at destination of each journey.
2. It will be very good luck if there is a new member of elephant was born during the time of your visit. The small elephant is lovely and most naughty.
