Elephant Nature Park

So far the most amazing part of my trip has been my time spent I'm the northern city of Chiang Mai. After that amazing first day here we unfortunately had to move hotels because we discovered ours was infested with mice and cockroaches yuck! But besides that minor set back Chiang Mai was amazing!

On the second day some of us went high up into the jungle on a zip lining course that took the entire afternoon. It was so much fun to fly through the jungle and see monkeys and such. They then fed us traditional Thai food and we went back to our hotel. And on our way to look for dinner we found the coolest coffee shop/restraunt/bar. It was outside by the river. You sat on pillows not on anything else. And it was so quite there. We ended up staying 6 hours. And the owners were so friendly. The mother of the owners spoke no English but she gave me a homemade Thai herbal medicine for my odd jungle bites I had received. She then asked to take her picture with me. This is her below:

But the best day was the last one. We all had booked this day tour at an elephant sanctuary. It is the only try sanctuary here in Thailand where they don't use the elephants for people to ride or labor. Apparently 20 years ago or so elephants were used on logging industry here on Thailand. But when logging was banned over 3,000 domestic elephants were left out of work/abandoned. They would be sold and forced to work on the street or chained up. This amazing lady adopts these domestic elephants that couldn't survive in the wild and has a open range home for them. No fences, no chains, just 100 elephants roaming freely. The tour we booked was only for six people and they let you spend the entire day with three elephants. We fed them, bathed them, played with them. Then the guide took us "rafting" down a local river. I say rafting like that because the water was so shallow it was more of a joke. At the end of the day this amazing woman met us and showed us around the rest of the sanctuary. All in all best experience of the trip so far. I had to take a waterproof camera once we started interacting with the elephants so I will post those pics later.