A few kilometres north of Phuket Town, near the Tesco Lotus Shopping Centre and Samkong Temple, is an old tin mine on which an ethnic Thai Village has been built. Here you can find 4 restaurants, a playground for children and pavilions housing souvenir shops, craft workshops and a stage where twice a day - at 13:00 and 15:30 - various shows attract hundreds of tourists. There are Thai martial arts and traditional dances, sword fights and a wedding ceremony. The show takes 45 minutes. Afterwards, you can go to a show where elephants demonstrate their skills in carrying logs. For centuries, elephants have been used in firewood collection. Nowadays, the exploitation of elephants by logging factories is prohibited. Only in Thai Village elephants continue to carry logs.
The jewel of the village is a large nursery where many exotic and rare varieties of orchids are grown and sold. A walk through the 1600 square metre Orchid Garden takes about an hour or two. If tourists like a particular flower, they ask the staff about the possibility of buying it, as not all local specimens are for sale. A small box with an orchid costs 300 baht, a large one 500 baht. There are also individual sprigs of flowers on sale for 10 baht each. All flowers in the boxes are labelled with the appropriate quarantine sticker allowing orchids to be taken abroad (some countries, such as Australia, have very strict rules when it comes to shipping plants or food from Thailand).
