Chiang Mai Zoo

We spent our Tuesday afternoon at the Chiang Mai Zoo. It was the most bizarre zoo I've ever been too. It wasn't really made to walk around in, you drove your car around ... which sucked because we didn't have a car and there were some pretty intense hills. The zoo is designed in the side of the mountain and so the exhibits are pretty amazing but hiking up the mountain to the different animals was a good workout. The other pretty crazy thing about this zoo was that they had no real cages! There would be a mote or hedge and then a hip high cement fence separating you from the animals. It was pretty cool when we first arrived and it was flamingo's and monkeys but when we started getting into the bigger more scary animals like the lioness who was hunting my kids with her eyes, it was a little frightening.

They had some pretty awesome animals. We were pretty pumped to see the baby hippo with it's mom and dad. They were swimming in the water and as we showed up their food was coming and slowly the three of them sauntered out of the water to the pile of nasty food and started munching down. They also had some elephants out of the normal spot and put them out so that we could feed them sugarcane and 'pet' them. The mama was super pregnant and we could see the sides of her enormous tummy moving around as the baby moved. They also had a little baby elephant with her that we were feeding. It was so cool to feel their trunks and get so up close to them. The kids loved it and each got a couple bowls of sugarcane that they fed to the elephants. Another awesome animal we saw were PANDA'S! How amazing is that!? First we found the exhibit and made our way to the display. There was one panda laying with its back facing us and that was it. Totally disappointing, especially since we had to pay extra to see it. Then it started to move around and came down, played on his little park for a few minutes and went away into the den. Totally bummed we left and continued on the path. We went into a room that was a lot brighter and there was this huge panda just chilling out with bamboo shoots all on his tummy. I thought it was stuffed he looked so posed for the camera but then I noticed he was moving and eating and ripping up the bamboo shoots! He was so COOL. They had two panda's up in these other rooms eating away and chilling out. I took millions (ok, so that's a little exaggeration) of snaps but I couldn't resist. They were so amazing! You'll have to go here to see the rest of my zoo pics!