It’s time to leave Chiang Mai and continue our journey north, and Bam is ready to greet us once more in the hotel lobby. Our driver for the next few days is called Mr Nung, and once our bags are loaded we settle in for the three hour drive. However after less than an hour we pull into the side of the road and Bam asks if we would like to use the spa. Slightly confused, she clarifies that we are at Thaweesin Hot Spring, famed for its thermal waters.
The whiff of sulphur permeates the air, combined with the smell of boiled eggs because people come here to buy eggs from the local stalls and cook them in the boiling natural water. Foregoing that experience we opt instead for the ‘Foot Spa’, gingerly dipping our toes into the hot water. Fortunately these particular waters are separate to the super-charged poaching pool, but they’re still the temperature of a very hot bath.
Feet duly bathed, and emerging bright pink, we get back in Mr Nung’s people carrier, and on we go towards Chiang Rai. The highway winds through mountains and forests, and across agricultural lands growing corn, garlic, shallots and pineapples. Eventually about 13 kms south of the city we come to our first proper stop of the day, Wat Rong Khung, known most famously as the White Temple. It’s unlike anything we’ve ever experienced.
Constructed in 1997 by internationally renowned Thai artist Ajarn Chalermchai Kositpipat, it’s essentially a vast art-piece reflecting his deep spirituality and immense imagination. He was given the land where an old temple stood, and has over the years created a quite spectacular masterpiece that is continually being added to. The whole construction reflects humanity’s greed, desire and destruction, whilst juxtaposing it against almost psychedelic visions of Buddhist beliefs and imagery.
We start by exploring the museum and gallery dedicated to Kositpipat’s work, and are utterly blown away. Intricate, colourful, thought-provoking and beautiful, his paintings, sculptures, collections, jewellery and more are incredible, as though he’s channelled divine visions and acid-induced hallucinations in equal measure. Photos aren’t allowed but we’re so seduced by his art we end up buying five signed prints to take home. Yet even with our appetites whetted by what’s on display in the gallery nothing can prepare us for the White Temple itself.
Set in immaculate grounds the glittering, porcelain like structure is amongst the most ornately decorated buildings we’ve ever seen. It’s genuinely astonishing from the outside, and we walk across the dramatic bridge, over outstretched arms of yearning souls trapped in a hellish underworld, to enter the dazzlingly painted inner sanctum. Half Buddhist temple and half pop-culture mural experience the interior is covered everywhere we look with incredible artworks.
One wall in particular is mesmerising, a vision of the everlasting circle of life, or the Buddhist notion of samsara, the realm of endless rebirth, suffering and delusion, which we can only escape by attaining enlightenment and entering nirvana. Amongst the traditional Buddhist imagery are contemporary references including the tiny, witty, cartoon-like images of Twin Towers, Elvis Presley, Harry Potter, Minions, Batman, Darth Vader, Michael Jackson, Superman, Kung Fu Panda, Incredible Hulk, Hello Kitty, Pokémon, Keanu Reeves, Spiderman, Pichachu and many more.
It’s head-spinning and glorious, the work of a maverick genius, and continues through a huge gold temple dedicated to Ganesha, and on into a brand new subterranean cave experience that is full of skulls, demons, underwater scenes, crazy rock formations, mythical imagery and ever-changing lights. We leave the White Temple with our minds melted.
By now it’s lunchtime so Bam takes us to a very basic local vegetarian restaurant in a run-down industrial estate where everything costs just over £1. We talk about Buddhism and vegetarianism with Bam, who agrees that there’s a huge disparity between the teachings of Buddha about compassion to all living and sentient creatures, as followed by the vast majority of Thai people, and the fact they all eat meat and fish in vast amounts. She explains that Thai people rationalise they are in fact still all vegetarian as long as they’ve not actually killed the animal they’re eating themselves.
The food is fantastic and served with smiles and kindness, filling us up for what is essentially the antithesis of the White Temple; Baandam Museum or the Black House. Created by Thawan Duchanee, another local artist of international renown and a contemporary of Kositpipat, it’s a dark and magnificent collection of his folk-art, featuring paintings, sculptures, animal bones, skin, horns and lots of black wood, spread across multiple buildings and structures in a park.
The cavernous main hall is like a Satanic temple, full of pagan imagery, mainly derived from the huge amounts of animal taxidermy, skulls and bones that comprise vast pieces of furniture and occult sculptures. Long tables are covered in leathery crocodile pelts and enormous shells while giant chairs are adorned with huge antlers. The paintings that hang on the walls all have QR codes that, when opened via Instagram, transform the static paintings into vividly coloured, moving artworks complete with eerie musical soundtracks. It’s quite breathtaking and a little disturbing.
Across the various buildings and workshops in the grounds must be the remains of tens of thousands of dead animals, gruesomely collected and preserved as works of art. There’s even the complete skeleton of an elephant laid out under a building.
After all this death, our next stop is appropriately enough at Wat Huay Pla Kang, a Chinese Buddhist temple dedicated to the Mother of Mercy, a similar figure to the Virgin Mary. Chinese Buddhism is unique as while the Buddha taught that there is no external deity but rather we all have a divine nature within is, Chinese Buddhists do believe in a God, separate to themselves. The Mother of Mercy is a popular part of their tradition and she is venerated at Huay Pla Kang in dramatic fashion.
First up is the traditional Buddhist temple, brilliant and white and beautifully decorated, and then we enter the eight-storey pagoda, which has a dramatic dragon staircase to enter and various model animals outside, including somewhat inexplicably, a mini tyrannosaurs rex. Inside, it rather has the feel of a shopping centre, albeit with a large wooden Mother of Mercy statue.
We climb the eight floors, the first three dedicated to further statues of the Mother of Mercy, and the rest dedicated to Buddha. Finally we get a little trolley bus up the man-made hill to the absolutely enormous white statue of Mother of Mercy towering above us, with the sun setting behind it. Once underneath it, we take a lift up 26 storeys and emerge in a decorated chamber behind her eyes where we get views of Chiang Rai’s countryside below us.
That evening we check into the Riva Vista Riverfront hotel, which is very new and very stylish, and after a disappointing meal in its almost empty restaurant, we head for bed ahead of an early start tomorrow. We’re off to the Golden Triangle, where three countries meet and the trade for many centuries was opium. It’ll be quite a trip!
