Black house, White temple

Day 45
Today was just as intense as the last. I got up at 07:30, took a shower and headed out on the bike. The idea was to go on an all out sightseeing to get all the big temples of Chiang Rai in on one day. We succeeded and the first stop was the Black house. This Temple is actually not a temple, but the house of an artist whom is no longer alive. It looks very interesting, the building was full of crocodile skins, skulls of bulls and weird statues of dicks. It had a big garden where the theme stayed the same. Everywhere around us was animal skins and bones, even an elephant skeleton was laying under one of the houses.

The next temple, is actually a temple. It is simply referred to as; Wat rong suea ten (had to look that up after visiting). Suea Ten means Dancing tiger, and the river next to the temple used to have tigers

jumping across it. About 100 years ago the temple was completely abandoned, and the one standing here today was started in 2005, and finished in 2016. It looked absolutely crazy, the modern technology creating an ancient looking temple made the details of this temple impossible to beat... or so i thought.

The White Temple. This was what I had been looking forward to since Nepal and finally we drove around the last corner to see it shine in the sunlight. This temple is made to represent the cycle of life and the teachings of buddha. The start of the temple has a bridge and under the bridge is hundreds of hands reaching out from the darkness, this is said to symbolize unrestrained desire. The bridge proclaims that the way to happiness is by foregoing temptation, greed, and desire. After crossing the bridge, I arrived at the "Gate of heaven" This is guarded by Death and Rahu, who decides the fate of the dead. After walking through the gate of heaven, we entered the

main building. It is full with pictures of flames and demonic creatures, In the center was a wax doll of the last Dalai Lama. When leaving the temple I walked along the river and noticed that there is another golden temple just a few hundred meters away. This is said to symbolize the body where as the white temple is supposed to be the mind. The gold symbolizes how people focus on worldly desires and money. The white building represents the idea to make merit and to focus on the mind, instead of material things and possession.

After watching temples all day we drove our bikes back to Chiang Rai, It took about 3 hours and once we arrived we walked to the buss station to get the night bus to Bangkok. When I wake up I will only have seven days before I realize my dream to go to Japan. This has been a good day.

Day 46

After (Not) sleeping in the night bus I finally arrived in the same hostel as the last time in Bangkok. The oasis hostel has a very chill vibe and it's situated perfectly, close to Khao san but not too close. The cleaning lady and reception girl remembers me from the last time and they where happy to hear about my travels and share some fruit that they picked in the garden. We laughed about how tired I was from the past few days and I crashed around 13:00. After getting up I just spent the day relaxing and waiting to get some good quality sleep later that night.