Travel Day 1083 – Bangkok, THAILAND
After my strange day on Khao San Road yesterday, I really felt like doing something a bit more cultural today and so I decided to visit Wat Pho and the Reclining Buddha…
Beautiful Wat Pho in Bangkok, Thailand
It was almost funny but during all the times I had been visiting Bangkok, it seemed I had never really done a lot of sight-seeing. For some reason Bangkok rather always seemed to be a great convenient base for me to recharge the batteries, do some errands, replace some ripped clothes, post things home, use the high-speed internet and just simply enjoy the amazingly great food that was even safe to eat anywhere on the streets…
But it seemed to me that one part didn’t have to exclude the other entirely and even if the weather wasn’t the nicest, with heavy rain clouds hovering over Bangkok, it still seemed to be a great idea to go for a stroll around town and see the famous Reclining Buddha of Wat Pho. This felt particularly like a good idea because the temple, located adjacent to the Grand Palace, was supposed to be the oldest and largest wat in all of Bangkok…
Reclining Buddha of Wat Pho, Bangkok
Getting to Wat Pho only required a short walk the Grand Palace and then another stroll down to the southern perimeter of the exterior enclosure wall. The entrance ticket came to a cost of 100 baht, which seemed quite a lot, but luckily not as much as the 500 baht for the Grand Palace would have been and we even received a free bottle of water to survive the visit of the temple during this particularly humid and sticky day…
The wat itself, dating back to the 16th century, was famous for Thai medicine as well as Thai massage, but what was drawing most tourists was probably the 46 meter long and 15 meter high Reclining Buddha. This enormously large golden Buddha was not only an impressing sight by itself, but if was housed in such a small building that it felt even more out of scale. In fact, the Buddha would have probably bumped his head on the exterior wall if he would have tried to lie down his head and stretch out entirely…
Tall Mosaic Chedi of Wat Pho in Bangkok
While walking then around the whole temple complex of Wat Pho, I was mostly impressed by the many beautiful mosaic Chedi, especially the really tall ones. These impressive, pointy structures were in fact nothing else but a Thai version of Buddhist Stupas which I had seen so plentiful while hiking in the Himalayan mountains of Nepal. They just happened to look very differently and much more ornate, even if the symbolism seemed to be still exactly the same…
After enjoying Wat Pho for quite a long time, I finally walked down to the river and sat down in a little park while watching the sun set slowly behind Wat Arun on the other side of the river. Eventually I would have to go and see that wat as well, but as for today, it had been a much better day than the last two and I finally felt that I was fully arriving in Bangkok…
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