After a Hot, Sweaty Day, Who Needs a Fake Temple? I Do, Of Course!

        

Wat Chedi Luang, Photos by D.R.R.

 After spending all day conquering temples, I hardly wanted to go back and find the one I’d missed in the morning, but after some pineapple and watermelon, I revived and shook some sense into myself. I might not have another chance. Yes, I was hot from a full day’s “work,” but Wat Chedi Luang was the famous one. How could I live with myself if I skipped it? I couldn’t.

So back I went into the Old Town of Chiang Mai, but this time I was aggressive. I gave up on relying on the map. I got close to the area where the temple was supposed to be and started asking questions. After three tries, I found Wat Chedi Luang right where it was supposed to be according to the map. (We’d actually made it to the temple grounds in the morning, but we hadn’t explored the whole compound after being scared off by the “Do Not Enter” sign. Since we hadn’t managed to go around to the correct side, we’d missed the entrance to the courtyard and hadn’t even glimpsed the huge temple.)

Luckily, for the moment I still felt well rewarded. The brick temple was cool even though it was in ruins. It was decorated with white elephants that stuck out of the walls and that were remarkably intact. There were also huge nagas or snakeheads. Steep stairs led up to the top.

When I saw some kids on the stairs, I immediately vowed to join them. Certainly I could rustle up a few more ounces of energy.  But not so fast--they were little monk boys charged with cleaning the temple. They were de-weeding it. Small green plants were sneaking up between the bricks, and they had to be pulled out one by one. The boys had been working on the whole temple. They’d accessed the top levels by means of a rope ladder. I wouldn’t have been brave enough to try that myself!

 I shot nearly a whole roll of film as I circled the temple. I tried to catch every angle. But when I got back to the guesthouse, I found out something quite disconcerting. The lovely elephant statues I’d seen were actually reconstructions. That’s why they were so intact. I was more than a little disappointed. I thought I’d been seeing the real thing, but the original statues had all crumbled. I had to stop and question the practice of reconstruction. Worse still, I subsequently found that the reconstructions had been done in the style of Central Thailand, but most historians think the temple was originally done in the Lanna style. It turns out that this tourist business is pretty complicated!

What's been one of your own travel disappointments?

In THAI TWIST, Rachel loses her cool when she finds out that Wat Chedi Luang is a reconstruction, but Gina is too busy finding Somchai to pay attention to a silly old temple!

http://www.drransdellnovels.com/thai-twist.html

Too Many Temples? No, Too Few!

        

Wat Umong, photo by D.R.R.

            One of the biggest reasons I wanted to go to Chiang Mai was that I knew it had lots of cool temples. Even though I’m not religious, when I went to Japan, I loved visiting temples because they were beautiful and serene. They represented a way of thinking and a way of life. In Bangkok I found that the temples were equally important or maybe even more so. In Bangkok we noticed that people came to temples such as Wat Pho and the Grand Palace with the full intention of spending a whole day at the temple site. The temples were places for people to get together and relax as well as to meditate and pray. 

            Thus when we reached Chiang Mai, I had a full plan for which temples I wanted to see. Of course this was not as easy as it sounded. We arrived at the first temple, which was supposed to be Wat Chedi Luang—or did we? We saw red columns. We saw doors with big figures in gold. There was a Buddha in the earth position. On the right were cabinets with religious urns. But something seemed wrong. We asked a school girl, but she laughed and said this was the temple we were supposedly looking for. So we took a few pictures and then we kept walking. 

Wat Phra Si Luang, photo by D.R.R.

            We got to Wat Phra Si Luang, one of the main temples. The red-carpeted structure had a Big Buddha inside with ten or so little Buddhas below. The roof had red beams which contrasted with white columns.  There was a pretty, smaller temple to the left side, and a smaller Buddha flanked by two more Buddhas and gold lotus blossoms.  A man and his son unwrapped lotus blossoms in big leaves to put in the pots before the altar.  In the corner was a vacuum and a monk.  Even temples get dirty!

            Then I had to let my poor tired friends stop for lunch even though I hated wasting the time for something so mundane. But then we proceeded to Wat Hua Khuang, Wat Lam Chang, and Wat Chiang Man. Wat Chiang Man not only had elephant statues, but it had its own elephant temple! It was very cool.

            By the time we’d visited Wat Umong, a temple whose name we couldn’t discern, and Wat Phan On, I conceded we might be done for the day. We headed back towards our guest house, but when we stopped for postcards at the edge of Old Town, I found views of the real Wat Chedi Luang. That’s not where we’d been in the morning at all!

         

Wat Chiang Man, photo by D.R.R.

   While my hot, tired, and footsore friends returned to the guest house, I retraced my steps until I finally reached the elusive Wat Chedi Luang. Luckily, it was worth the extra effort.

            For my fictional version of Thailand, a novel called THAI TWIST, please see http://www.drransdellnovels.com. Indeed, the protagonists visit a couple of temples--but not all of them!

            When have you had the most trouble finding an iconic site? If the Eiffel Tower weren’t so high, I would probably have trouble finding it too!

How NOT to Get to Thailand’s Ayutthaya Historical Park

One of the reasons I wanted to go to Thailand was to visit all the archaeological ruins. The first set of important ruins, Ayutthaya, is situated a bare forty miles north of Bangkok. And according to my guidebook, it would be a short train ride to get there.

            However, I messed up on something crucial: getting to the train station. My first terrible mistake was agreeing with my friend, who thought it would be fun and easy to travel to the train station via the canal. In theory this should have been simple. We were staying near the Grand Palace. There was a canal stop only a short walk from our hotel.

Ayutthaya. Photo by D.R. Ransdell

            What we weren’t prepared for was the utter confusion at the water landing. People were scurrying to get into one line or the other, and there were several different express boats that stopped at the same place.

            But I was armed. I’d worked on Thai for over a month, so I bravely asked for the right boat to get to the train station.

            The first lady I asked looked at me as if I were completely crazy. The second lady looked away when I reached my second badly pronounced word. My third victim, a male teen, pointed to the boat that was just pulling away.

            My friend and I waited on the banks. Another line had already started forming. After a brief wait we were able to make our way onto the boat. But then came another surprise. The boats go SO FAST (after all, they’re express boats!) that the drivers have to put up plastic flaps so that people don’t get completely soaked with canal river water. This was bad for us because it also meant that we couldn’t see where we were.

Ayutthaya, Wat Mahathat  Photo by D.R. Ransdell

            We sped to the first stop, where our speed mobile paused for about ten seconds as people scrambled on and off. Then we were zipping through the canal again. Neither my friend nor I had caught the name of the canal stop, but we didn’t have a chance to communicate with one another. Instead we were thrown back into our seats as the driver gunned the engine.

            We reached the second canal stop and had no better idea where we were. Again our vehicle paused briefly before speeding away. But then I got a clue. I saw tall buildings through the cracks of the makeshift plastic awning. We were in the business district. We were in the heart of modern Bangkok.

            We were miles from the train station. At the next stop, we scrambled out.

            Smarter travelers would have found a cab and gotten to the train station the “easy way,” but now that we’d reached a modern section, we couldn’t find any cabs. It was only after a big fight that we even figured out where we were on the map.

Wat Rachaburana, Ayutthaya. Photo by D. R. Ransdell

            We were way off course. My friend had insisted on an early start, and I had begrudgingly complied only to lose everything by getting us so far of course that we had to find a bus to get back in the right direction of the train station, and after that we had to cover another few blocks on foot. By the time we got to the station, we found we’d just missed one connection and had to wait for the next.

            I was seething at my own incompetence, but my friend calmly took a seat at the train station after finding an English-language newspaper. By the time we finally caught a train, it was nearly noon.

            By then I’d made a pact with myself. No more attempts to speak Thai. We just didn’t have the time!
            Train stations aren't usually so hard to find--or are they? What's your own worst experience of trying to reach a train station?

For a fictional account of a trip to Ayutthaya, please see www.drransdellnovels.com/thai-twist.html

The Grand Palace, No Misnomer!

The first time I went to Thailand, I got to Bangkok after dark. The month was December, so it wasn’t late, just dark. After a harrowing ride to our hotel (given that our taxi driver was trying to outrun all the vehicles on the road), we arrived at the Queen’s Hotel. The friend traveling with me would have been glad to have spent the rest of the evening relaxing over a nice dinner. But I had other plans. I was determined to go see the outside of The Grand Palace. I was able to insist on this for a simple reason: the important royal complex was close by. I knew that because I had rather purposefully chosen a hotel that was close to two major attractions, Wat Pho and the The Grand Palace itself.

So despite jet-lag, I dragged my poor friend out on the street so that we could walk past The Grand Palace as our grand introduction to Thailand. Even though we could only see some of the rooftops of the buildings inside the complex, I was still thrilled. The rooftops were orange with green and white tips, so they were particularly distinctive. We could also glimpse the tops of chedis, or ceremonial mounds. The high wall around the complex prevented us from seeing anything else, but we didn’t care. We took a long loop around the building just to get an idea what it would be like when we managed a full tour the next day. 

The Grand Palace complex was so rich in history, in decoration, in importance, that we should have gone back several times. We didn’t have that luxury, so we tried to take in the whole thing in a single afternoon (after spending an exhausting morning at Wat Pho!). We missed quite a few things (as we found when we went back a few years later), but no matter. We got a sense of the fine complex. We saw the outside of the royal quarters. We enjoyed the decorations with fanciful warriors. More significantly, even though he was very, very far away, we got a glimpse of the Emerald Buddha, which is one of the palace’s most cherished claims to fame.

We came away with a sense of the grandeur of Thailand and its world importance. We felt privileged to have seen its delicate fine architecture and its cheerful decorations. By the end of the day we were exhausted but excited to be anticipating three weeks in such a fascinating country. 

My recent novel THAI TWIST is a cultural romance about two sisters traveling in Thailand. Most of it is fiction. But it starts with one sister being dead tired after arriving in Bangkok and the other insisting on a walk to The Grand Palace. In this case, art definitely imitates life!

To find out more: 
Author website:
http://www.dr-ransdell.com
Novels website:
http://www.drransdellnovels.com