Chiang Rai the White Temple
Chiang Rai is the location of the famous “White Temple” which as it sounds is a temple that is completely white. I think I wrote in an earlier post how I’m kind of getting bored with regular Thai temples and this one just sounded so cool so I was really excited for a chance to go there. We decided to take a day trip up to the White Temple, “Long Neck” Village, and Golden Triangle. The entire thing takes all day and you spend about 8 hours total in the car with several stops and rest breaks. As per usual with these kinds of things we were the youngest people in our van of about 15 and were clearly the loudest. I don’t really remember a single thing about the other people in the van except one old dude complained a lot and I think two of them were sisters and one old dude had really long dreads.
The White Temple was true to form really quite amazing to see. It was created as a tribute by Thailand’s National Artist and features 10,000 little reflective silver pieces that kind of look like mirrors. The entire thing is white with a bit of an off white grey part at the entrance which is a really really well done depiction of hell with hands reaching out of the ground all in grey. Then you walk over a bridge and the temples is there in all its white sparkly glory and its really beautiful even considering the 10000000 tourists and the fact that it looks WAY bigger in all the professional photos that have been taken of it.
I was able to even get a few cute photos with Ashley who's harder to photograph than the loch ness monster.
Our second stop was the “village of the long neck lady” as our cute slightly strange tour guide put it. This is the location of those women with like 25 gold coils around their extremely elongated necks that you read about online or see in “Ripley’s Believe it or Not!” books. This was the real thing and to me it was a really big reminder about how globalization and consumerism are killing small cultures. The science behind these women is fascinating. They aren’t really “elongating” their neck by stretching or anything, the coils actually are so heavy that they compress and depress their rib cage and push down their shoulders. If you look at them standing next to someone of the same height, their neck starts at the same place it just goes down further and their torso is so compressed. The young girls though get teased in school and so it is thought that within a generation maybe two there will be no more long neck ladies. The sad thing is that they have just become a tourist attraction where they try to sell you things and people take photos of them. Yeah we did too, of course we did, but it kind of made me sick to be there. Their tradition and way of life is dying and it is painful to watch it go even if the idea of “elongating” your neck disgusts me.
That first photo was just a really cute little baby who climbed up to that point to pet a cat on his own. I was astounded by his ability to climb and also that he was pretty much alone. The second is a side by side of a "normal" skeletal structure and that of the long neck ladies.
The third and final place our day trip took us was the Golden Triangle where opium and other drugs and illegal stuff was traded between Laos, Thailand, and Burma/Myanmar. They used gold on this little island between the three countries because it wasn’t owned by any of the three countries so opium wasn’t illegal and they didn’t have the same currencies so they used gold. Now a days it’s just a tourist attraction and both Laos and Burma/Myanmar have Casinos right there because gambling in Thailand or Casinos in Thailand are illegal. We tried whisky with snakes in it and that was pretty much gross in principle but surprisingly mild whisky besides.
All together today was a bit more touristic than perhaps I would have liked but it was still a good day and the white temple was worth it to see just once. There is also rumor of a pink temple but I don’t know if I’ll ever have time for that since its over an hour outside of Bangkok. Its crazy, already it’s November and everyone feels like they are running out of time. I have almost a month exactly left before I leave this country and I’m so not ready to leave.