2 Days 1 Night Hiking and Elephant Experience

This overnight program splits the best of Mae Wang across two days: a hiking day in the hills with a night in a bamboo hut, then a full day with the elephants of Chiang Mai Elephant Home and a bamboo raft ride to finish. It suits active travellers who want time in the countryside as well as time with the animals, and who are comfortable with simple accommodation.

Day one starts with pickup in Chiang Mai between 08:00 and 08:30 and a drive of about an hour and a half south, with a stop at a local market. You then hike for around two hours through farmland and rice terraces into the jungle, eat a picnic lunch of Thai food, walk on in the afternoon and finish at a waterfall where you can swim. Dinner is home-cooked, and you are welcome to help in the kitchen. You sleep in a bamboo hut with mosquito nets.

Day two is the elephant day. After breakfast you travel to the camp, change into a camp shirt and hear how the elephants came to be here. You make treats, feed the elephants from a basket of bananas and sugar cane, and spend time simply watching them. After a buffet lunch you join them for a mud spa and then walk to the river to bathe and brush them. The day ends with about an hour of bamboo rafting before the drive back, arriving in Chiang Mai around 16:30 to 17:00.

The camp sits in a village in Mae Wang district near a national park. It has taken the saddles and chains off its elephants and does not offer riding; you walk with them, feed them and bathe them instead. Times on the elephant day are approximate; there is no fixed schedule.