Another hostel, another free breakfast.
This one comes with tea, toast, cereal and bananas. When I googled somewhere to
stay the other day I discovered there had been an earthquake in the Chiang Rai
province of 6.3 magnitude only on Tuesday, so 4 days ago! Crazy to think we
could have been here when it happened. The main reason for coming here was to
see the white temple and I read in an article that had been partly damaged and
was closed, so I was very happy to find out it had only closed for the day and
was reopen for us!
We debated about hiring bikes to ride
around the town but decided to go all out and hire a scooter for the day and
ride to the temple ourselves. It only cost 250B, which is about £5 for 24
hours! Absolute bargain! The temple was about 12km from the hostel and it was
one straight road to get there, so we couldn’t really get lost. I have driven a
scooter once before in Malaysia and got used to this one really quickly and
loved every minute.
The white temples official name is Wat
Rong Khun. This contemporary temple began being built in 1997 and apparently
wont be finished until 2070! He has since added it will take 2 years to fix the
damage the earthquake has caused. This is the most impressive temple I have
ever seen. I think because it’s not traditional and has been created by an
artist you can really see the story behind it. He’s a crazy man but still, it
was amazing to look at. I think you might have been able to walk through the
temple and get closer than what we got but just seeing it was better than not
seeing it at all.
We left the temple grounds and made our
way about 17km down the road to see the Khun Korn waterfall. We went down some
crazy potholed roads and I managed to miss a lot of them! We then had to go on
a 1600metre trek through the forest to find the fall. It was totally worth it,
out of all the waterfalls I’ve seen on this trip this could potentially be top
spot, you could feel the force from the fall as soon as you got to the top of
the trail.
When we left the waterfall we took the
same journey back to the temple and onto the highway to take us back to our
hostel. On the way back we stopped in the Central Plaza shopping centre to take
a look around. We bought a few goodies, grabbed some lunch at 5pm as we hadn’t
eaten since breakfast and then went back to the hostel.
Seeing as we had the bike we decided to
take it out for a spin in the evening and find the Sunday market, which was
slightly too far to walk too and good job we did! Within about 5 minutes of
arriving at the market a storm appeared and did the rain come down! We took
shelter in a pub for about 40minutes waiting for it to stop and when it did…
well, we went outside to walk back to the bike to get back before it started to
rain again and the road was completely flooded. It was about 3inches deep so we
waded through it and somehow the road from where we parked the whole way back
was fine. We were gutted as we really wanted a bit of street food and the
market looked really good before everyone grabbed it all and legged it under
cover!
