Wat's up?

Okay, cheesy title but irresistible.

Last week I made a pilgrimage to Wat Phra That Doi Suthep, a Buddhist temple overlooking Chiang Mai. This particular wat was built in the 1300s and is one of Thailand's most sacred pilgrimage destinations. You can see the temple's chedi from the city on a clear day, glinting gold in a sea of green tropical forest. Here is a close-up photo of the chedi:


The morning began trying to catch a songthaow...a red bus/taxi that costs almost nothing and takes you wherever you want to go. The only catch is that a songthaow picks up as many people as possible, so it can take quite a while to arrive at your destination. Luckily virtually everyone taking songthaow up the mountain wants to see the wat, so it was not hard to find transposition straight to the temple.

After a stomach-churning ride up the mountain, I disembarked and walked up the 297 steps to the temple. I was expecting many foreigners, but most of the people at the wat were Thai. The temple itself is nothing particularly special, but the views from the temple's observation deck were stunning:

After the wat, we continued our drive up the mountain to a small Hmong village called Doi Pui. This was by far my least favorite part of the day; the village was full of beautiful stuff for sale, but there were almost no tourists. The whole place was very sad, poor, and the vendors, although they wanted us to buy things, were not very excited about tourists tromping through their village. On the positive side I did find a very interesting article for sale:

I'm 99% sure this is in fact the name of an herb (seems like tiger private parts might be hard to come by) but I was not motivated to buy the bag so I guess I'll never know. Maybe one of my blog readers can enlighten me?

More adventure stories to come asap, including my white water rafting trip this past weekend.