Elephant Poopoopaper Park

Elephant Poopoopaper Park doesn’t keep elephants — it’s a paper mill that turns their dung into stationery, and once you know that going in, watching the process is genuinely more interesting than the premise suggests. Fibre-rich dung is trucked in from partner elephant camps, rinsed, boiled, and beaten down to pulp before it’s pressed into sheets and dried in the Mae Rim sun. Entry is 150 THB for everyone, and the park runs daily from 09:00 to 17:00 with the last guided tour departing at 16:00.

The self-guided route runs through a series of open-air stations where staff demonstrate each stage — collection, boiling, blending, pressing — before depositing you in a drying yard lined with racks of blank sheets curing in the heat. It doesn’t smell the way you’d expect; the fibre is washed and boiled thoroughly enough that the finished product is odourless, closer to handmade cotton paper than anything else. A DIY crafting studio lets you press your own sheet and decorate it into a card or bookmark, included in the base ticket — more elaborate decorative extras cost a bit more if you want to go beyond the basic kit.

Insider Tip: Go in the morning. Demonstrations run more frequently before lunch, and the drying yard is more active — by mid-afternoon, staff have often finished the day’s batch and there’s less to actually watch.

The retail side is bigger than the production side, with an air-conditioned shop selling notebooks, greeting cards, and photo frames made from the paper. It’s a reasonable stop for gifts that don’t weigh down a suitcase, though card payment can be patchy — bring cash. Kids tend to enjoy this more than the “elephant” name suggests, since the hands-on crafting is the actual highlight rather than any animal encounter.

Watch out: There are no elephants here to see or feed — if that’s what you’re after, this isn’t the stop; it’s a paper workshop that happens to use elephant dung as its raw material, not an elephant experience.

It sits just off the main Mae Rim road, an easy add-on to a day that also covers Queen Sirikit Botanical Garden or Mae Sa Waterfall further up the valley, and works fine by songthaew, taxi, or rental scooter from Chiang Mai.