Wat Phra That Doi Suthep, or Doi Suthep for short, is one of the most hallowed places in Northern Thailand, built in 1383 under the auspices of King Keu Naone and his elephant. As the story goes, said elephant was carrying a sacred Buddha relic on his back, and the royal party was following behind, with the intention of building a temple on the spot where the holy elephant stopped. Well, he made it all the way to the top of the mountain, then keeled over and died. Thus the temple was built right there. It's less than an hour away by motorbike, and those switchback turns are fun!
Another fun fact: when I tell people my name is Step, it is pronounced a lot more like Suthep than the part of a staircase, so the mountain and I feel much affinity towards one another.
Despite being such a tourist mecca, Doi Suthep is still a working, living temple, and we saw more Thai tourists than Westerners. There was a CMU graduate walking circles around the chedi for merit; dozens of ladies knelt on the floor to shake out fortune sticks; and a monk in one of the wíhăans a monk knelt on an elevated seat, ready to bless visitors with chants and white threaded bracelets.
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| Things are just grayer on Step's side of the mountain. |
Since it's so important, Doi Suthep has all of the bells and whistles that you might find at a Thai temple. Along one exterior wall of the temple, there is a line of hanging backpack-sized bells, which people passing by can ring—either in (we assume) some ritual fashion, or simply (we observed) in repeated fashion because one is an exuberant youth about the height of the bells. Near the bells is also a large gong with a convex center, which people would rub and then gently strike with an open hand, for quite a big sound.
Everywhere you look there's something to impress you, from intricate elephant carvings to amazingly detailed golden murals of myths, but nothing beats gold. The centerpiece of the complex is a blindingly bright copper-plated chedi crowned by a five-tiered umbrella. For a brief while, it’s like the world is covered in gold leaf and incense. Well worth the 306 steps it takes to crawl to the top.
I was going to ask "Wat's Up?" but now I know. Love the photos. Very curious about the drinks you all are holding.
ReplyDeletePat, those are young coconuts. They're for sale on every street corner. You pick which one you want, and then the vendor expertly cracks it open with four sharp whacks of a mean-lookin' machete and serves it to you with a straw sticking out of the lid. After we emptied these particular coconuts, we went back and he split them open and gave us plastic spoons to scoop out the white meat inside. Phil has become an addict.
DeleteConveniently, at all of our farms there have been coconut trees with large bamboo sticks nearby. One looks very silly while doing so, but one can poke the coconut out of the tree, taking care not to get hit on the head. I am slowly getting better at chopping them open, though not cutting off any fingers is still a miracle to me.
When she says "poke them out of the tree," you have to picture us standing on the ground, holding a twenty-foot bamboo trunk wobbling high in the air like a vaulting pole, jabbing many times at a cluster of coconuts.
DeleteI'm chuckling at the image of wobbly, super long bamboo weakly thrusted at clusters of young coconuts, and ofcourse, the inevitable cartoon sound of a coconut hitting someone's noggin (though I'm guessing in real life that would not be funny at all).
ReplyDelete