One Day Hiking and Elephant Experience

This is the active version of the one-day program. Before you meet the elephants you spend the morning on the river and on foot: about an hour of bamboo rafting, then a two-hour hike through farmland, rice terraces and jungle to a waterfall where you can swim. The afternoon belongs to the elephants of Chiang Mai Elephant Home. It suits travellers who want to earn their elephant time with a walk, and families with children who can manage a couple of hours on the trail.

Pickup in Chiang Mai is between 08:00 and 08:30, then about an hour and a half of driving south with a stop at a local market. The rafting comes first, a calm ride on a bamboo raft with a few small rapids. Then the hike, which ends at the waterfall. At the camp you change into a camp shirt and sit down to a buffet lunch of Thai dishes and fruit. Your guide explains the elephants' history and behaviour, and you make vitamin balls or tamarind treats, feed the elephants bananas, sugar cane and grass, and spend time close to them. Then it is into the mud for the spa and down to the river to bathe and brush them. You are back at your hotel around 17:30 to 18:30.

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. Wear shoes you can hike in, bring sandals for the river and keep your swimsuit on underneath; you will get wet three times in one day.