Wednesday, January 24, 2007

So I have left it far too long, and you have already lost interest in the hols but here are a few pics and a terribly short account of what we did. Actually I shall split up the post, I realise the pictures would make it far too long a post. Don't want to scare you off.
So here are TEMPLES (we saw many more but these are the most noteworthy ones, acutally I think we lost count of the number of temples -Wats- we saw, and that's not counting Angkor....).


This is apparently the finest example of a northern style Wat (temple). It was called Wat Chaing man and was in the city of Chaing mai.
This is another northern style Wat (also in Chaing mai). They seem to be mostly constucted of wood (Teak) and while coloured in gold paint much less shiny than the Wats in Bangkok. There were many Wats in Chaing mai but I don't really want to post 100 odd pictures of Wats, really there are that many! Perhaps we have around 2000 pictures between us. I am not even sure if these are the best ones because I haven't taken the time to look through them all in any great detail yet! These first two pictures are out of sequence however I am not about to start this whole post again so you will just have to bear in mind went to Chaing mai (a small city in the north of Thailand) in the last 5 days of our trip.
The grand palace, former residence of the King of Thailand (In Bangkok). And let me tell you they LOVE the king, pictures and paintings of him adorn buildings everywhere, EVERYWHERE! Any street will have 2,3,4 pictures of him or shrines devoted to him. Big pictures too, covering the sides of sky scrapers in Bangkok. We noticed that many people seemed to be wearing yellow polo shirts. We later learned this was to show devotion to the King, yellow is his colour.


Wat Pho, the oldest Wat in Thailand (or just Bangkok, either way, old).
Chedi at Wat Pho, these are essentially tombs.
The Emerald Buddha Wat and surrounding shiny buildings, they really were very shiny, quite spectacular.

Short and skirts and other immodest clothing are not allowed in this temple area (around the royal palace), bit of a pain in the heat!
Kelly posing with some colourful chaps. We saw these two temples on our first day in Thailand, and then in the evening of the same day we caught a Konn performance. Konn is the traditional Thai dance and we were lucky enough to see an extra special piece which had been recently commissioned for the Kings birthday, yes the King again.

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