A late start to the day after the festivities of the night before. I did manage to catch Helen and say goodbye to her, she is leaving to go to Laos. I will be making the same journey soon, but want to spend some more time in the North of Thailand first. I decided I would finally go to the Chiang Mai zoo. While I like animals, the main reason I wanted to go was to see the Giant Pandas they have there. So I grabbed a tuk-tuk and off I went.
The Chiang Mai zoo is nowhere near as large or impressive as the Singapore zoo, but I still enjoyed myself, just slowly walking around and having a look at things. The zoo itself is quite nice, and most of the animals were in large open enclosures. Once again, the tourist map was more than useless, and so I just walked around aimlessly until I was sure I had seen everything. To see the Pandas you had to pay an extra fee, which allowed you into their enclosure. I didn't mind paying, as I know that the money is going towards the conservation of the Pandas. There were only two of them, and the female didn't do much except sleep. Luckily the male put on a bit of a show, walking around and eating bamboo a few meters away from me.
The zoo is spread over quite a large area, up and down some rather large hills. And so like my previous few days trekking in the mountains, I was once again walking up hills in the Thailand heat. I only spent a few hours at the zoo, but by that stage I had seen most of what there was to see. The Pandas were by far the most interesting things, but I also managed to get some good closeup views of hippo, crocodiles, orang utang and gibbons. Although while the rest of the zoo was pretty good, I felt that the gibbon cages were very small and there wasn't much for them to play with. To head back to Chiang Mai, I jumped on a local Songthaew, and had a slow trip back through the rush hour traffic of the early evening.
While I have really been enjoying eating all the different foreign foods, I am also starting to get sick of rice and noodles, which are the staple foods here. A lot of restaurants and eating places serve western food, but it is never particularly good and always two to three times the price of local food. Looking in the Lonely Planet guidebook, I found a nearby cafe that supposedly did good Italian and Mexican food, so decided to treat myself. I ordered chilli con carne, and looked forward to a the spicy meaty Mexican goodness. Unfortunately what I got was something quite different. A small serving of very bland mince and bean mixture, with about 6 of the weirdest corn chips I have ever seen, and side serving of brown rice. Bizarre. I was quite disappointed, considering the price I had paid, the only good thing about the meal being the sour cream. Oh well.
In the evening I met up with the people from my trek again, as well our two tour guides. We proceeded to have another great evening out, even if it was a lot quieter night. We just sat around and had (quite) a few quiet drinks. We ended up sitting at a street side bar until after the sun had risen, before we all decided it was probably about time we went home to get some sleep.
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