On Saturday the 11th, we took a half-day tour to Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep, which sits high up on a mountain overlooking the city of Chiang Mai.    This temple is very sacred to the Buddhist people, who make regular pilgrimages up the mountain to visit it.  It is also a very popular tourist destination year-round.

Our tour operator picked us up around 8:15am.  After stopping at a few other hotels for more tourists, we headed west out of the city.  We drove up the mountain on a steep, winding road with sharp turns that made you feel like you left your stomach behind.  To our surprise, there were quite a few Thai people walking up the mountain on the same route (which supposedly makes their pilgrimage to the temple more sacred), as well as some athletic-looking mountain bikers riding up the mountain too.  Once we got up into the mountain, the temperature dropped and it started to rain.

On the way there, we stopped at a Hmong hill tribe village.  For many years, the people in this village grew opium poppies to make heroin.  The Thai government, in an effort to cut down on the country’s drug trade, encouraged the Hmong people to grow something other than opium – such as flowers.  So this village now has a huge garden of beautiful flowers with wandering stone pathways, and tourists come to take photos, buy handmade crafts, and tour a museum of Hmong hill tribe artifacts that the village donated.

Tourists and Thai locals both refer to the temple as Doi Suthep, but that is actually the name of the mountain as well as the surrounding national park.  The mountain is about 5,000 feet above sea level.  According to legend, a monk gave a sacred relic (some say a statue of Buddha, some say a bone fragment from Buddha’s skeleton) to the king of the Lanna Kingdom in the mid-1300′s.  The king placed the relic on a white elephant’s back and set the elephant free into the jungle with his servants following closely behind.  The elephant wandered through the jungle, climbed the mountain of Doi Suthep, and fell over dead.  The king felt that Buddha had “chosen” that location on top of the mountain, so the king ordered the temple to be built on the exact spot where the elephant died.

To get up to the temple itself, a person has to climb a staircase of over 300 steps, with a golden dragon handrail on each side… or ride a cable car elevator (we took the cable car up and walked the steps down).  The temple was bustling with activity, between Buddhist worshipers and farang tourists.  There were groups of children wearing traditional clothing and performing music and traditional dances, construction workers climbing scaffolding to put new gold sheet metal on the temple’s dome, monks in orange robes chanting and blessing the crowds, Buddhist worshipers lighting incense and candles or placing fresh flowers among the altars, vendors selling everything from hot coffee to Buddha tshirts, and tourists recording the whole scene with their digital cameras.

Here are a just a few of the photos I captured from the whole experience.  Enjoy!

Tags: temple, tour