Chiang Mai: Day 5 (Chiang Mai Zoo and Wat Prathat Doi Suthep).

Our only plan on our last day in Chiang Mai was to finally make the trek up Doi Suthep mountain to visit Wat Prathat Doi Suthep, a large temple that is located at the top of the mountain just west of the city. We had no intention of going to the Chiang Mai Zoo — since we plan to visit the Singapore Zoo in a couple of days (apparently the Singapore Zoo has a very popular night safari attraction). But once we looked into the best way to get to the temple it seemed like a stop at the zoo made sense, since it lies at the base of Doi Suthep mountain and there is a “baht bus” (songtaew) stop just outside the zoo entrance that specializes in taking people up the mountain.

I am really glad we went to the zoo. It was a great shady walk and had tons of animals. You could pretty much feed every animal at the zoo for 10 baht (3 cents) except the lions and tigers. If you want to see Sam feeding an emu, elephant, hippo, giraffe — scroll to the videos at the bottom of the blog. The zoo had absolutely no crowd and was a great pit stop for the boys before heading up the mountain.

After the Zoo, we jumped in the baht bus to the mountain temple. The temple overlooks Chiang Mai and dates back to the 1300s. Three hundred stairs lead up the last portion of the mountain from the parking lot to the temple — but we opted to take a cable car up to the peak. The temple was amazing and the view demonstrated just how big the city of Chiang Mai really is.

After the temple we had some tom yum and khaow soi soups and did our last walk through the night bazaar. Tomorrow we leave Chiang Mai. We are pretty sad to leave but we plan on coming back to northern Thailand in the spring to see some more of Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai provinces.

Chiang Mai Zoo:

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