Chiang Mai is really an interesting city. In addition to many temples, they have a very nice zoo and picturesque ruins of the wall that originally surrounded the city.
My favorite part of the zoo was being able to get really close to giraffes. You could buy a handful of veggies for 10 Baht and feed the animals. They have long, snake-like tongues. There was a young boy there at the same time we were, and the giraffe just freaked him out! They are one of the few zoos outside China to have Pandas, and they had a juvenile Panda there, just 2 years old. Pandas may look cuddly to some people, but to me they look big and bad tempered. I would not want to meet a Panda in the wild. They had a pygmy hippo and I thought that was just cool. The zoo was laid out on hillsides, with a lot of open green space. The enclosures could have been better, but overall it was not a bad zoo.
The city was founded during an era of frequent warfare and was originally surrounded by wall. Not much remains of those now, but there are a few sections that survive. The city has outgrown the walls and the area inside the walls seems small, but many of the really great wats are inside the old walls. Here's a wall segment. Mexica got these pictures by getting out of the taxi and braving several lanes of traffic!
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