6th January, 2017

Happy Epiphany! It seems a long way from Christmas here, though it is sadly not blazing hot and sunny. Indeed, yesterday we even had a little rain! Still, it didn’t put us off and we jumped excitedly (alright, lumberingly) into the hotel shuttle at 1000 for our first visit to the old city of Chiang Mai. Our hotel is a little way outside so 20 minutes later we were dropped off and proceeded (in a westerly direction) towards the parallelogram that is the old city. There is still a moat with water in it (and fountains) and some of the old gates still remain after a fashion, but the biggest difference to new CM was less traffic.

The city is largely made up by a grid of streets with a temple (or wat) about every 500 yards. We decided to try a few of them mentioned in TripAdvisor. First up we passed a rather nice little one, Wat Inthakhin, a couple of pictures of which are in the photos below.

We did try to get into the art gallery but it was being done up for renovations, but there are always interesting sights in this part of the world to keep you amused and amazed.

We finally made to Wat Phra Singh and whilst the interior was not the finest, we did have to take our hats off to the ability locally to make the MOST lifelike wax models of past monks, in front of which we stood for some time just checking that were not actually real monks just sitting ridiculously still! See for yourself…..

We then attempted to walk to the second big temple, Wat Cheri Luang, missed the turning and ended up some way away. Luckily taxis are really cheap here if somewhat more open air than back home. The downside is that you are very much up front and personal to all the fumes going – and there are quite a lot! The temple though is certainly impressive, though I do sometimes wonder what the Lord Buddha would have made of it all what with all the gold leaf. Note the safe in front of the statue just inside the entrance. Before we went inside, I made a quick detour to a shrine that houses the city pillar, a shrine so important that women are not allowed inside – their rules not mine! Val NOT impressed!

Now those of you who might be familiar with this temple are probably expecting some stunning photos of the unfinished mausoleum of some 700 years standing, which, apparently, is just behind the temple displayed above. Sadly, we somehow missed it. Poor research, largely. Sorry. Mind you, knowing just how many more temples we are going to see on our travels,I am pretty sure you won’t mind.

We got possibly the oldest taxi in CM to get us back to the hotel, one which would certainly not pass an emissions test and probably not any other test either. The pollution is not good!

More soon (blog, not pollution- though…….).