…More Northern Twitterings.
When touring the north, I spent one night in Phayao. And you might be thinking “Who the heck goes there? There must be few tourists.” Well, yes, it is a sleepy kind of place – pleasantly so – but a lot of people must go there because the hotel I’d chosen to stay in was fully booked. After uttering a few
Nosing around on Google Maps I found a new hotel right on the lake. So new that Google Earth and Street View show it as a building site. The ABIZZ Hotel (yes, all caps) is really nice and highly recommended.
If you pay a little extra you get a lake view. I didn’t; so I didn’t!
Anyhoo, across the lake (okay, you have to drive around it not across it) and up a hill is Wat Analyao. This is not your average run-of-the-mill Buddhist temple. I don’t really know how to describe it. Extensive, as per my headline, mostly ancient, a wide variety of buildings, temples, pagodas, and statues in different styles. In fact, you name it they have it. And it’s all contained in a heavily wooded, overgrown park-like setting. I must have spent two hours there.
Oh, and I don’t have any aerial photos because the trees cover everything. All you would see is tree tops.
I might have made it sound spooky. It isn’t. There’s a kind of reverence to the place.
Adjacent to the entrance is this building…
…but as far as I could figure, you don’t go in there, but rather, head through this gate and up some steps…
After that you’re on your own to create your own route. The pathway splits into five. I chose to start with the leftmost working my way to the rightmost, exploring whatever I could find down each path.
One of the many teak temples…
And then down one of the pathways was this rocket ready to lift-off to Mars…
Okay, I have a good imagination!
Then there was this Buddha statue, with the common seven-headed naga (snake) for protection…
A typical teak interior with gold Buddha statue – a little blurred as there was almost no light…
Of course, there were Buddha statues everywhere…
Some of the buildings seem to be completely unused. It took me a while to figure how to sneak into this unlit one…
In case you’re thinking there’s too many statues and not enough pagodas, well…
There you go. Which brings us back to the entrance…
…which is the only place you can get a view of Lake Phayao.
Phew!
