Oh My, Chiang Mai

Chiang Mai is the biggest northern city in Thailand with about 174,000 people.  Even though Chiang Mai is a relatively big city, it's a nice place to be and it isn't terribly busy.  Chiang Mai has a nice, relaxed feeling to it compared to Bangkok.

This picture is me at one of Chiang Mai's millions of Buddhist temples.  The temples here are mostly bright, new, and beautiful.  Most of them are plastered with gold and have these lovely dragons flanking the entrance. 

This is a pile of catfish in the little pond at one of the monasteries.  They sell fish food at the monasteries, and you can go into their pond to feed them.  The result is this squirming mess. 

 This is one of the less new temples in Chiang Mai.  This place is called Wat Chedi Luang, and one of the monks who was walking around here told me that it is the biggest stupa in Chiang Mai.  Apparently it used to be overall the tallest building in Chiang Mai a long time ago.

 These are some of the people I met at the guest house I'm staying at.  Of course, every now and then you have to take a break from temple tours to hang out in one of the nice rooftop restaurants.

This is me hanging out with some holy people at the temple.  That's what we do in Thailand.

Guess what - another Buddha!  This one is way different from the ones in Sukothai, though.  He's new and colorful (and absolutely enormous).

This is the inside of one of the temples.  Later this day, we went to another temple that looked similar to this.  I was sitting there talking to an American guy named Will about this and that, and then a monk came in to ask us for help in translating something in English.  We talked for a few hours about all sorts of things, and then he asked us to stay for the chanting that the monks do every evening.  He gave us a sheet of paper with their chants written on it, and he showed us the proper ways to bow during the chanting.  So, we stayed, chanted, and meditated.  It was fabulous.  These chanting sessions are a really great way to clear your mind and energize yourself.

This is part of one of the most famous temples in Chiang Mai.  The temple is called Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep, and it's a huge temple on top of the biggest mountain in the area.  I went up here with a nice Danish guy named Hendrik that I met at my guest house.  The next few pictures are all of the same temple.

This is the Chinese Buddha.  There is a lot of him around Chiang Mai's temples.  That's probably because we're so far north and closer to China.

Hendrik and I decided to take a long walk down the road away from the temple, and this is what we found.  It was a really nice Chinese-style thing with a pretty garden, and it was sitting way up the hill with a beautiful view of the valley.  In this picture, you can see that there's also a dog there.  We started following this dog around, and he took us to some pretty nice places.

 This is Ban Doi Pui - a little mist-covered town up on the mountain.  (This is another place that the dog lead us to.)  It was a really little town, and it showed me that Thailand does have nice places where people are actually living their lives - like, not everyone is stuck in the tourism industry.

This is me in a really great garden in Ban Doi Pui.  This garden was amazing.  It was right next to a waterfall, and there were flowers all over the hill next to the waterfall.

This is a fountain at that garden.  I keep seeing this statue everywhere, and I have no idea who she is or what she stands for.  I'm guessing that she's involved in Buddhism somehow?

The Dawn of Happiness

 From Ko Phagnan, David and I made our way north to Sukothai spending one night in Bangkok.  Sukothai means "rising of happiness," and it was the capital of Thailand a long time ago.  Now, Sukothai is a big historical site with really impressive ruins.  David and I took a day to rent bicycles and ride around the Sukothai ruins.  The next day, we went to another set of ruins in Si Sanchanalai (about 50km north of Sukothai).

 There are tons of Buddha statues in these ruins, but most of them are pretty burnt and weathered.  This is probably the most in-tact Buddha that we saw.  Unfortunately, the signs at Sukothai don't really explain much of the history of the area.  However, David and I came up with a theory that everything was burnt down at some point or another, because most of the ruins look pretty black.  However, that might also just be how this kind of rock weathers... no idea.

 This is a really big Buddha and a really little me.

 David and I played hide-and-go-seek here.  He ended up having to come look for me, even though I was supposed to be the seeker.  There are a lot of ruins to hide in...

 This is a pretty cool place, right?  Being the lazy person I am, I spent a lot of time just lying around by the ruins and thinking about life.  It's a great place to waste some time.

 This is David looking Buddha-like.

 This is David with our bicycles.  They give pink ones to the girls and ugly ones to the guys.  My bike also had a really nice bell that I used as much as possible (even though there was no one around to ring a bell at...).

 I knooow you might think that all the Buddhas look the same, but I think they're all really great.  Keep in mind that I'm only posting a very small fraction of the Buddha photos I took...

 This is me and David standing in front of the main Sukothai ruin site.

 This is where the photos start from Si Sanchanalai.  Si Sanchanalai is an hour bus ride north of Sukothai and it is much quieter than Sukothai (if that's even possible...).  There were basically no other people in the whole park while we were there.  Si Sanchanalai also had much more impressive ruins than Sukothai.  This was probably one of my favorite places that I've visited so far.

 I like to call this guy the Blank Buddha. 

 From what I understand from the signs (written in pretty bad English), this is a cheti in the khmer style.  I'd like to have one of these at my house when I grow up.

 We climbed up into an old stupa ruin that gave us pretty good views of the ruins nearby.  This is me sitting at the top of the stupa thing.

 This is David at the entrance to a little room on top of the stupa.

 This is what it looked like inside.

 Guess what... More Buddhas!  These are newer ones that were inside a temple.

 This was my favorite ruin out of all of them.  This one has a lotus style cheti thing, and it was located off in the forest before you got to the main site.  It sort of reminded me of a fairytale.

 This is the main stupa of the Si Sanchanalai site.

 This is me chillin with the buddhas.  I think I fit in quite well.

This is the last Buddha we saw.  He's located at the top of the Si Sanchanalai hill, and you have to go up 144 steps to see him.  Every step was definitely worth it.















These pictures were all from yesterday and the day before.  Today, I left David and took a bus farther north to Chiang Mai.  The bus took 6 hours, and I'm pretty exhausted, so I haven't seen much in Chiang Mai yet.  However, from what I have seen, it looks like a pretty amazing city.  I haven't been in a big city for a long time (besides the day in Bangkok), so I'm pretty excited to hang out around here for a while.