Wats & Night Safari

Chiang Mai is a very historic city in northern Thailand that served as an important Chinese trading route. It was originally protected by a brick wall surrounded by a moat. The moat still surrounds the original city footprint & is called the "inner-moat" area. Most of the brick wall has crumbled, but the corners and a few of the main entrances still remain. We spent the morning walking around the inner-moat area exploring several Wats (temples) that were built 800-1000 years ago. Some of the structures have been refinished, while others have been left to age (sidenote, we lost our Lonely Planet so we can't remember the names of the Wats, we will have to come back and add those later).

Our favorite Wat was a huge pyramid type structure that had been partially restored. On each side were different creatures that stood as sentinels. One side had dragons, one side had king cobras & one side had a herd of elephants. We also enjoyed entering in the restored Wats that were still functioning as Buddhist temples, one had at least 50 Buddha statutes.

Our plan for the evening was to visit the Chiang Mai Zoo's "Twilight Period," which our LP said occurred from 6-9PM, we really wanted to go to this zoo because they have Giant Pandas. We flagged down a taxi (in Chiang Mai they are red trucks w/canopies with bench seating in the back). The taxi drove us out there, we paid him, he left, then we found out that the Twilight Period is no longer operating. We were stuck 12 kilometers outside of town & had a stinging feeling the taxi knew all along that he was driving us to a closed zoo. There were a few other taxis outside, offering to take us to Chiang Mai's latest attraction on the other side of town called the Night Safari. We had been scammed alright, but we figured what the hell, so we took another taxi to the Night Safari.

Thailand's old Prime Minister (the one that got overthrown in 2006), was from the Chiang Mai province & he funneled a bunch of the country's money back into the area. One of his pet projects was the Night Safari, which cost millions. When we arrived the grounds looked like Jurassic Park, there were beautiful buildings adorned with animal statues everywhere. The Night Safari consisted of four things: 1) a 1 mile walking loop around a lake with animal enclosures on each side (highlights were rare white tigers, black leopards & pygmy hippos), 2) a 30 minute tram ride called "predator prowl" (highlights were lions, tigers & Asian bears- oh my), 3) a 30 minute tram ride called "savanna safari"(highlights were white rhino, giraffes & zebras) & 4) a laser-water fountain show in the middle of the lake set to classical music. The laser show was pretty ridiculous, but awesome at the same time. The differences between this zoo and one you might find in the US is all the libability induced protection measures that an establishment in the US would take and that the Thai totally disregard - for example, when our tram stopped at the tigers one was standing on his platform which was of equal height to the 4 foot fence that enclosed him, so by standing on the platform the tiger could've easily jumped over it and devoured us, this was true for most of the animal's enclosures. While a bit scary this meant all of the animals were really close to us and easy to spot. Downside of the night was when we went to get a taxi home it was an unnegotiable 250 baht (which was an over three times the 70 baht it had cost to get out there). We concluded the night cursing the Chiang Mai taxi mafia (we ended up negotiating the ride back down to 200 baht with the help of an older Thai gentlemen).