The Chiang Mai Zoo

Last week we decided to visit another local attraction in our quest to check out all of the places listed in the Sanook Book, a guide for families in Chiang Mai. We picked the zoo and managed to find it quite easily, despite forgetting the map at home, as usual.

This zoo is huge! Thank God one of my mom’s coworkers was kind enough to lend us a stroller, because Isabella wouldn’t have lasted five minutes at this place without it. The first thing we saw was the giraffe exhibit, where for 10 or 15 baht you can purchase snacks to feed the giraffes. Olivia and Dave were right in there feeding them, but Isabella was pretty scared.





Next we wandered passed some ostriches and emus (and this weird bird we called a peacock/ostrich/dinosaur):



before finding the jungle-cat section, which contains tigers, leopards, and jaguars. Really cool, but a bit scary in light of the incident at the zoo in California. It really seemed like the cats could get out if they truly wanted to. Olivia was too scared to look, but Isabella liked it and was even willing to pose for these pictures with this creepy stuffed tiger (although not until after I knocked vigorously on its head to prove to her it was fake!)





Next we were on to the hippo exhibit, just in time to watch the workers using brooms to herd the hippos out of the water. There are three hippos, and we were able to get close enough to their pool to narrowly avoid being sprayed by poop when they let it fly in the corner. Lovely!



We were wandering around looking for the next exhibit when we came across a six-month-old lion cub roaming freely around the zoo. Even though he was small, he was still pretty darn intimidating. Even more intimidating was the sight of his anxious mother staring at us from inside the lion “cage.” I use the word cage loosely because there was really just a skinny moat and a small fence separating us from the lions. Olivia was way too scared to get anywhere near it, so she was effectively trapped on the path between the lion area on one side and the freely wandering baby lion on the other. The worker accompanying the lion cub got a big kick out of Olivia standing there shaking in her sandals.

We stopped at one of the many places to eat and had some Pad Thai, which Dave said was “tainted” by the presence of tiny dried shrimp. The girls were getting really tired at this point, so we quickly checked out some monkeys and then headed home. We didn’t even come close to seeing everything the zoo has to offer and will definitely have to head by there again sometime soon.