roganjosh

So my time in Thailand has been pretty elephant heavy so when I heard that there’s a giant, three headed, 250 ton elephant statue in Bangkok, inside of which there’s a Buddhist shrine I figured I had to go and check it out! The Erawan Museum was only completed a few years ago, and it doesn’t seem that that many tourists have heard about it yet. Plenty of Thais have though, partly because it’s a holy shrine, but also because of a rumour that a woman who prayed there won the lottery the next week! The statue itself is incredible - perched on top of a pagoda it’s 43 metres tall, and looms over the freeway next to it, all three heads saluting the traffic. If three heads seem somewhat excessive for an elephant it’s worth bearing in mind that this elephant is the vehicle for the Hindu god Indra, and is sometimes depicted with 33 heads! I think that would have been a bit fussy really, but the statue as it is seems reassuringly balanced as you gaze up at the enormous trunks hanging over you. To reach the shrine inside you walk up a spiral staircase in the right leg, or you could get the lift in the left. The shrine itself feels quite small compared to the size of the statue, but it’s still pretty cavernous. In the event of an emergency there’s a fire exit in the tail…

Apart from all my elephant adventures I’ve finally made it down to Bangkok after plenty of bus and train journeys. I decided to break the travelling up by going to visit the old ruined city of Sukhothai, which has a nice Indiana Jones feel to it as you walk around the temple walls and look at the Buddha statues. Handily they’ve put in plenty of paths too so it’s easy to cycle around. The most impressive sight there was another enormous statue, this time of a seated Buddha at Wat Si Chum. The statue’s hand was taller than me, and worshippers had mostly covered the fingers in gold leaf as an offering.

And so now here I am in Bangkok, which is typically hot and humid, getting ready to do some last minute shopping before I head back to snowy old England! You can look forward to me sticking several thousand pictures on a website sometime soon!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 9:47 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.