Getting out of town

Doi Suthep, Forest Wat, and the Night Safari

After the festivities of Loy Krathong were over, we had more time for sights outside of Chiang Mai. Our first stop was to Wat Phrathat, an elaborate temple complex atop Doi Suthep (Suthep Mountain). This is a very important Wat in Chiang Mai because of the holy relic it houses. Of course, there's a legend that goes with it, and it includes a white elephant.
Doi Suthep, Forest Wat, and the Night Safari (November 5 - 7)

After the festivities of Loy Krathong were over, we had more time for sights outside of Chiang Mai. Our first stop was to Wat Phrathat, an elaborate temple complex atop Doi Suthep (Suthep Mountain). This is a very important Wat in Chiang Mai because of the holy relic it houses. Of course, there's a legend that goes with it, and it includes a white elephant.

Doi Suthep

In the 14th century (of the western calendar), a monk was travelling with a sacred relic, though to be a splinter of Buddha's bone. He was accompanied by a white elephant, who carried the relic for him as he journeyed. When the monk stopped in Chiang Mai, the sacred relic performed a miracle and duplicated itself (it was apparently famous for its ability to duplicate itself, turn invisible, and move itself around). The monk took his original relic with him and wandered off towards the local high mountain, Doi Suthep. When he got to the top of the mountain, the white elephant died, and so the monk knew that this was a sacred place and built a temple there. Meanwhile, the monks in Chiang Mai build a sister temple to house the duplicate relic, which would create a spiritual connection between the two temples.

Because the temple was so far out of town, we had to hire transportation. We managed to find a sorng taao that would take us. We had to pay more because we were the only passengers (a full truck brings lower fares), but I don't think a tuk-tuk would have been any cheaper. When we arrived, the place was swarming with tourists and tour buses (the elaborate double-decker luxury kind), minivans, sorng taao, tuk-tuks, and taxis. There were also many food and souvenir vendors, all clamoring for attention. We bypassed this chaos and headed for the famous naga staircase leading up to the temple complex.

Naga Stairs at Doi Suthep

Golden Chedi being rebuilt

After hiking up all those steps, we toured around the plethora of crowded wats and the fancy golden chedi that houses the sacred relic from the legend. There were many pilgrims and visitors participating in a variety of rituals, almost always involving lotus buds and incense (helpfully sold by the monk sitting at the front gate). There were also a lot of bells and gongs scattered about the temple complex. A very large gong had a sign explaining that if the gong is struck quietly, it is more auspicious. So despite all the striking of bells going on, there was no deafening clamor—just the soothing murmurs of the bells.

Giant gong to ring auspiciously

Temple at Doi Suthep

Many of the wats had fancy shrines in them, and while we were viewing one of the shrines, several people came in and received a blessing from the resident monk. He chanted and dipped a bamboo flail in a jar of water, then flicked the water over their heads. Then he tied a string around the wrists of the male visitors, while another monk did the same for the women. String is used a lot to create a spiritual connection between two things that share the string. In some paintings we saw, Buddhist monks will sit in a line with a single string tied around their wrists. Also in some temples, a string will connect a very large Buddha to a smaller Buddha if the large one is inaccessible for some reason. The string used in this ritual was looped around a small Buddha statue and then tied to the large Buddha in the middle of the shrine. After the monk tied the string to the visitor's wrist, he cut the length off so there would be a spiritual connection if no longer a physical one. We watched a number of Thai people receive this blessing, and then the monk motioned for us to come closer and we ended up getting sprinkled and chanted at and wrist tied, too. The monk was very exuberant when sprinkling his flail at me and I got rather doused. [The water they use is lustral water, a special water created by having the four elements interact with it. After looking the ceremony online, I learned that a number of religions have lustral water, which is usually a special, more potent version of their holy water. --Ryan ]

Night Safari

The Night Safari in Chiang Mai is a new zoo they just built with open areas of freely mixing animals. During the day, you can walk around and see caged animals like in a normal zoo, but the highlight of the park is the night experience. There are two safari-style buses that take you around to see either the grassland animals in their open enclosures or the "Predator Prowl" with various large carnivores like big cats and crocodiles as well as other large beasts.

We grabbed a tuk-tuk to get there and arranged for the driver to return at a certain time, giving ourselves sufficient time for the two safaris and about 30 minutes extra for the "fountain show" which had been recommended by rave reviews on Trip Advisor (a vacation activity ratings website). The two safaris were a lot of fun, and on one of them our tour guide (an English-speaking Thai person) was a real comedian. The only shortcoming was that we never stopped long enough for the camera to get a long-exposure picture, so our footage came out a bit blurry. At least Ryan's camera was much better than some other tourists' we met on the safari. As we drove through the various areas, the guide pointed out animals and shone a spotlight on them so we could see (since it was night time and very dark otherwise). I think my favorite animal there is the giraffe, since they are simultaneously so majestic and ridiculous.

After the safaris, we had about 20 minutes to kill before the fountain show started, so we sat on a bench and started to doze off. Eventually a fountain started up in the center of the lake there, and scenes of the Night Safari were projected onto the screen of water while pompous music blared out from overloaded speakers.

I fell completely asleep during this absurdity, and then we noticed that it wasn't even time for the show to start yet. We sat through this foolishness for about 10 minutes, and then the real show started. We sat through about 5 minutes of the highly recommended snoozefest while anemic lasers played across the spraying water in time to some sort of music. We decided to get up and check out a sign to something called "Jaguar Trail," which turned out to be one of the best parts of the zoo. (In fact, this is the area that you can visit during the day, but at night it's far superior because there's no hot sunlight, no crowd of tourists, and you can catch the night feedings of the animals.)


White tiger at the Night Safari

Unfortunately, we only got about a third to halfway through when our arranged time to meet the tuk-tuk arrived. We hurried through the rest of the Jaguar Trail, trying to slow down enough to enjoy our private tour of the animals, but also rushing to catch our tuk-tuk without being too late. By arrangement, we hadn't paid for the ride over yet (we'd pay everything when we got back to Chiang Mai), so we didn't have to worry that he would leave without us, but neither did we want to be rude and delinquent. I really wish we'd given ourselves another two hours to take in all the animals at our own pace, but I guess there are just times when you don't know yet what will be most worth your while.

We hurried back and met the tuk-tuk driver, and after apologizing for our tardiness we convinced him to take us to a restaurant we wanted to try, rather than returning us to the downtown area where we'd hired him. (I'll review that restaurant, Dalaabaa, in the next post.) After being such a good sport about everything, and getting us to the restaurant magna cursu, we gave him a generous tip, and got his phone number so we could call him when we were done, or another day if we needed him again. Though this isn't really what I meant to talk about in this blog post, I would like to comment on the uselessness of getting a tuk-tuk driver's phone number.

First of all, we didn't have a phone with us, and (perhaps stupidly) rather than having the restaurant call him when we were done, we decided to walk back to the hotel after supper. We were very full and I wanted a chance to stretch my legs some and work off the fine meal, but it took us a long time to get home, and after that we were very tired. We did decide to call for that tuk-tuk several days later when we wanted to check out another out-of-the-way restaurant, and after contacting the driver by phone, we wound up waiting about 15 minutes for him to arrive, only to learn that the restaurant had moved and was now so far out of town it would cost a fortune to get there by tuk-tuk anymore. (Not really, and in fact such high transportation prices will become common when we're in the south, later on, but up in Chiang Mai his price carried a hefty sticker shock.) Now, having called for this guy and waiting for so long, we felt obliged to have him drive us somewhere, even though we ended up going to a restaurant of his recommendation that was completely within walking distance. When we arrived, we were somewhat amused to see that the restaurant he'd picked out was one that we had been to already, and had been considering as a backup for this evening anyway. (That restaurant, Just Khao Soy, also gets reviewed in the next blog post.) So I think our lesson is that when you need transportation, it's just more convenient and probably cheaper to hire somebody on the spot and not plan ahead so much. (Ouch! I wish I had remembered this lesson in the south when we were buying boat tickets to take us between the islands! We ended up overpaying waay too much and getting locked into non-refundable tickets that we had to work hard to change when our travel plans changed. Arrgh.)

Forest Wat

A couple days after going to Doi Suthep and the Night Safari, we decided to head out of the city once again, this time to visit the tranquil Forest Wat (Wat Umong).

The Wat itself is in a small woods adjacent to the university and is a peaceful place for meditation or just getting a change of pace without having to travel too far. The highlights of the Wat are the tunnels dug out at the directives of a clairvoyant monk in the late 14th century and the image of the fasting Buddha (a gruesome, skeletal statue).

Chedi at Wat Umong	Fasting Buddha
Tunnels at Wat Umong	Altar in the tunnels

The tunnels were not very labyrinthine, but the inclusion of several shrines made them interesting, and it was fun that they passed beneath the ancient chedi and exited on the other side of the chedi mound. There were a number of wild chickens hanging out near the chedi mound, pecking for seeds and bugs, so the contemplative nature sounds were occasionally punctuated with cocks' crows.

One of the buildings in the monastery housed hundreds of paintings of various Buddhist lessons, some of which were clearly Christian-influenced. The paintings ranged from very simple to elaborate works of art, and we spent about an hour just wandering around, gazing at them all.

Eventually we'd seen everything we needed to see and hiked out to the entrance to the forest and hired a tuk-tuk to take us back home.


Mural at Wat Umong

See more pictures of Chiang Mai