Originally Posted by
thebadger
Day 5/Night 6 Chiang Mai
This will be a full day excursion to the Patara Elephant Camp for an elephant safari with bamboo rafting. Visiting the camp, you are shown how the animals are trained from young age onwards and the “pupils” will demonstrate what they have learned. Then you will ride an elephant through the jungle for 1 hour.
Then board a raft to view the beauty of the countryside along the river, with lunch provided. This is followed by a visit to an orchid farm before you return to your hotel.
This evening, enjoy a Khantoke dinner, highlighting northern region specialties
I'm a little suspicious about this part. I thought that Patara Elephant Farm only offered full day "Elephant Owner" tours, not the typical elephant trek, elephant tricks, and bamboo rafting. This excursion doesn't sound like Patara but one of the more common, cheaper ones from a different vendor. Based on the reviews on TripAdvisor, I'd suggest actually doing the full day Patara (
www.pataraelephantfarm.com) excursion instead if it is in fact not Patara that you are currently looking at. We have one scheduled for December, so I'll let you know if it was as good as the reviews seem once we get back.
Also, if you are dead-set on two different beaches, I'd do them in reverse order. There are non-stop flights from Chiang Mai to Phuket on AirAsia, and then you could non-stop it back from Krabi to Bangkok on many of the airlines. This would save you a connection in Bangkok by reversing the order and going to Phuket instead of Krabi first.