in an elephant’s footsteps
Friday, November 14th, 2008by Rachael
Boy, that elephant had some stamina!
With some holy relic of Buddha strapped to his back, off he went walking up the mountain – the place he stopped would be the site of a new temple. All I can say is he made it a long way up before taking a breather! We only had to walk the last 300 or so steps, having driven up in an open-backed taxi-truck. I’m not sure the elephant used the winding road, which now snakes up the side of the hill (actually, at one point it had a hairpin bend that continued to curve around past itself, only 10 metres higher up – most impressive). The ride back down again would prove to be even more exciting as we hurtled over the double yellow lines on every corner.
But that’s later. Right now we are driving along the perfectly flat road commenting what a great city Chiang Mai is for cycling……when suddenly, abruptly, without warning the front of the truck tips up like an aeroplane on takeoff and we are ascending the hill. I wonder if the elephant noticed.
Anyway, up at 3,500 feet is Doi Suthep, the largest and most famous Buddhist temple around. Been sitting there in all its splendour since 13-something. That’s a long time. Like other places of worship, it’s also a centre of commerce and we paid for rice noodle sausages and three hilltribe costumes for the younger girls. We did not, however, pay the “foreigner’s fee” and no-one asked us for a ticket. made us wonder if the sign was there simply to make tourists who paid “500 baht per person including entrance fee” feel happy they could walk right past the ticket booth without having to wait. Well, there was no-one there to collect money and so we walked right past too….and were happy our whole trip cost 500 baht for all of us. And that included the taxi driver waiting two hours for us to do our looking and photographing and bell-ringing (we had read somewhere online that we could ring the bells – when we got to the end of the line of bells we saw the sign: DO NOT PUSH – oops) and bell-examining from the nice cool marble floor and and painting-admiring and monk-following (for a photo) and touristy-goods-buying.
Another great day.
rayres