Last updated on March 26th, 2026 at 05:16 pm
These creatures will touch your soul
Our group at the Baanchang Elephant Park.Elephants. It’s hard not to love them. Something about them just fascinates us. And if you love them as we do, you’ll love this place.
The Baanchang Elephant Park is about a 45-minute drive just northwest of Chiang Mai, Thailand. It offers private day tours with small groups of Elephants. Here, you’ll get to feed, handle, ride, and wash them for an extended period in a small group of people.
Some tours are longer or shorter depending on your preference. We spent about 6 hours with our pachyderm buddies for the day. It was a blast! This truly is a thrilling experience.
What your money pays for
By paying your fee to engage with these wonderful giants at this place, you're aiding in the recovery, preservation and maintenance of happy and healthy lives for these wonderful creatures. This park acquires most of them from the netherworld border areas of Myanmar and Thailand. They’ll pay up to $50,000 for an elephant.
Many of these gentle giants were used for logging in work camps. Others were used for circus-like entertainment. Many were broken, beaten and mistreated before their arrival here and at similar parks.
Elephants are highly intelligent and social. They need interaction with other Elephants and humans. In fact, they love their trainers. It takes a while for each elephant to trust and love their mahout. Once they do, they're lonely without them.
In fact, elephants remember former trainers up for up 20 years according to the managers of this park. When you’re riding one of these giant beasts, you'll notice they’ll start looking around for their trainer if that person happens to disappear from their view, even if it’s for just a moment.
Experts at the park told us it takes about a month or six weeks for male elephants to adjust to their new mahouts at the park. Females adapt to new trainers more quickly.
Bananas, of course, are the treat of choiceThe tour
A tour here begins with dress. A park guide issues a blue uniform for each person to wear. This is great for most people, except, ahem, me. I’m 6’3” and 250 lbs. Not a common size in Thailand.
The elephants like the uniforms. For them, it’s visual cue of normalcy, a sign that all is Ok. Also, you’ll get dirty and smelly being around these creatures — another good reason for the uniform.
After a change of clothes, you’ll get a briefing. You’ll be assigned an elephant. You’ll be told the history of the animal, how the park acquired it, and what is known about the living conditions for the animal before it came to the park. You’ll be told of any peculiarities of dealing with your particular elephant.
Next, you’ll receive instruction on how to command the elephant. The commands, of course, are all in Thai. Elephants at the farm respond to commands to kneel (so you can climb aboard), rise, stop, and start. You command them to turn left or right with a nudge to the ear on either side.
Next, trainers will show you how to feed them. This is your chance to get to know your animal.
With preliminaries out-of-the-way, you’re ready for a ride. You’ll command your elephant, climb on board, command it to arise and get in a queue. The elephants are used to doing this, and some of it happens automatically. But as several in our group found out, like us, elephants have a mind of their own. One or two decided to walk off and grab a snack until their mahout nudged them back into our line. And that’s what they do — nudge them. Nobody really tells an elephant to do anything it doesn’t want to do.
Elephants have a mind of their own!With a line in place, our guide tells us to command the elephants forward. We march around the park in a single line. You sit on the elephants neck when you ride. If sit on their shoulders, your back will rise and fall, side to side, and you’ll end up with back pain. I speak from experience.
It takes about an hour to ride around the park. After that, it’s time for you and the elephant to relax. This is where the real fun begins. You dismount, grab their lead, and coax them into a lake. Actually, coaxing is a bit dismissive of what happens here. Elephants love the water and need little prompting to dive in. You stay out-of-the-way until they are in the water!
Brushing the elephantWith a pail and brush, you join your elephant in the water. This is the best part of the entire experience with your elephant. They love the scrubbing you give them. You can see it in their eyes, and feel their joy as they caress you with their trunks. This, truly, is a bonding experience, animal lovers will appreciate.
Once out of the pond, your mahouts will take control of the elephants and you’ll return to changing room. Later you’ll pose for a group picture.
Group photo. Uniforms are, ahem, for small peopleWhat about ethics and animal rights?
After our jaunt with the elephants, we ran into several people in Chiang Mai who told us they wouldn’t go to this park, or any like it, because they consider these activities with the elephants to be abusive. We just don’t see it that way.
Animal rights activists can debate whether these parks perpetuate the “human interface” problem or not. The owners of this park pay up to $50,000 to buy these creatures from shady characters along the Thai-Myanmar border. This is an area where criminals round up and abuse the elephants into submission so they can be used for various purposes. One could argue this perpetuates the cycle of abuse by encouraging “criminal” owners to capture, abuse, use and sell these animals.
The fact is, humans are encroaching on the habitats of the entire animal kingdom worldwide. And, elephants have been used by man for thousands of years as working animals, just as have buffalo and other creatures. Until the cycle of illegal captures can be curtailed, recovery habitats like this place are important. They educate all of us about these creatures while providing them with a safe, happy, and interactive life they need. After all, they're mammals, just like us. And they're intelligent.
Go and enjoy! This is truly a thrilling experience.
Contact:
Baanchang Elephant Park – Private Day Tours
147/1 Rachadamnoen Rd, Chiang Mai 50200, Thailand
Email: info@bannchangelephantpark.com
Web: www.bannchangelephantpark.com
Tel: 66-53-814174
Mobile: 66-89-6355206
Office: +66-53-814-174
*66 is the country code. Inside of Thailand, you do not have to dial this code. Add a zero before the second group of numbers (as in the 53 or 89 above) and dial.
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