We wrapped up our sightseeing on Sunday with a visit to Wat Arun and a ride down the "Vienna of the East".
Wat Arun is commonly known as "The Temple of Dawn". If you have read my previous posts on Bangkok, you might remember that the word "wat" means a Buddhist temple. Wat Arun earned was fittingly named after the Indian God of Dawn, Aruna. The significance of Wat Arun is that the architecture was modeled after Mount Meru, which is the center of the world in Buddhist cosmetology (www.watarun.com 2/26/14). Mount Meru is not an actual mountain as one might thing, instead it is a symbolic representation of the center of the universe, perfection, a way of thought, and transendance, which is sought by Buddists (watarun.com 2/26/14).
We visited here in the afternoon and unfortunately the beauty is really demonstrated at sunset, despite being the named after the God of Dawn. I am going to upload a picture a picture from the internet so you can see the true beauty.
The main prang is 79 meters in height (a prang is a characteristic of Thai temples). On picture, I believe the concrete stands out. However, up close we were able to see probably millions of tiny ceramic tiles that decorate the prangs. In addition to the tallest prang, there are 4 smaller prangs, representing the God of Wind. There are also various statues of demons, other goddesses, elephants, as well as things i am forgetting.
Visitors are able to climb up and down VERY STEEP steps that are not in outstanding condition to the first level for views of the Chao Phraya river down below. These pictures were taken from that first platform. I hope the picture of me climbing down the steps demonstrates how steep this climb really was. I am not overly fearful of heights, but I was pretty nervous and had sweaty palms doing this. You had to walk up sideways because the steps were obviously not designed for big western feet. On the way down, I made Mark walk first so if I fell, at least he would stop me before I flew off the balcony and plumeted to my death in front of hundreds of tourists.
This picture shows The Sky Bar in the background. It's the golden dome. We visited there on Saturday evening.
After our tour here, we walked around the grounds for a bit before decided to ride on a motorized gondola, for lack of better word, back towards our hotel. Apparently, the Chao Phraya River and parts of Bangkok are known as "The Vienna of the East". We flagged our boat down and climbed aboard this 22 ft. long vessel. We are all about the "experience" when we visit places and sometimes this requires one to take a bit of a leap of faith. You can see from the picture that this boat is very long and then has a tarp-strapped diesel engine on the back...the driver uses a broomstick to steer this rather large engine through the waters, while a zillion other boats are doing the same thing. We were cruising at a pretty fast clip and we had to keep our mouths shut as to not get any of the water splashed in. I am sure if we swallowed any of that water, we would become ill within minutes! Anyways about 5-10 minutes into our little adventure we realized almost every other boat we passed had their passengers wearing lifejackets. We looked at our driver, he just smiled and waved...safety isn't always a big deal in Asia...Ten minutes later we arrived at our destination all in one piece. We were rather suprised at the ability of the boat "captains" to parallel park these boats with such little to work with, but ours did it like a champ!
Then it was back to the hotel via a 10 minute train ride, a delicious Thai dinner (which is probably both of our favorite types of foods), and footie massages to wrap the evening up.
I hope you all enjoyed our Bangkok trip as much as we did!
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