In a fairytale

"Wow," I said to myself when I accidently found the white temple instead of toilets. The name sure is right! White all over, with a lot of shiny ornaments. It really looks like aliens put it in the middle of somewhere. It almost does not fit in here. But once you are in the complex, 13 km out of Chiang rai, everything fits as it should. Even the toilets are shiny and beautyful (but golden otherwise). Chinese are vigorously taking slefies with smartphones and selfiesticks. And we are sitting quietly under the shadow od trees made out of metal good luck signs that tourists can buy for 30 baht. The temple started to emerge in 1998 when an artist decided he wants to build the best budhist temple with current art. Amazing! The site is largely still a construction site and one can now start to wonder how the whole place will look like when finished. If ever, as the details here are really amazing! As one of the visitors wrote in the guest book: It would be truly amazing if it would be snowing here:).

Main temple

Very interesting is also a inside of main temple where you can see a big painting on the back wall with artist's contemporary lok. On curent politics. It includes George Bush, Osama bin Laden, WTC towers in New york beeing bombed and variety of film and cartoon caracters from the most known movies.

We are in Thailand now, after a loooong and vey bumpy road on the local bus from Nong khiew to the border which included slow, 10km/h ascents, and bumpy descents where we were flying for half a meter from the seats.

Crossing the border was smooth, nothing compared with cambodia-laos border. Tin Thailand we changed sides of the roads, they drive on the wrong side all the time. I am not sure why:) but it takes some time to get used to it, especially when crossing the roads, some close encounters with motorbikes were therefore inevitable.

Compared to Laos and Cambodia, it is very clean. I would say it is clean even for our standards. You can really see that their economic standard is much higher. Besides I think it is also cheaper - probably because tourists are not separated from other people and we use same restaurants, food stalls and transportation as native residents. And I find people here very friendly, always smiling to you and inviting you to come to their shop politely. For sure different as in arabic countries. SE asia really is easy and pleasant to travel!

In the morning before going to the temple we went to a cat coffee. A special coffee place where cats are true owners of the place. You can play with them (if they want of course), see cat sex (under your table) and if you are not carefull enough maybe you can take one home in your bag.

Chaing rai might not be the most touristy place in Thailand but it is very pleasant to stay here. Night market with ugly yellow metal tables and plastic chairs offers dishes for less than an euro (including some insects -we tried crickets and they are quite nice:)) and fried rice for breakfast was also almost too cheap. I think we could gain some kilos here!

As I am writing this we are driving to Chiang mai already the last stop of our journey before going to hte Koh tao to dive! We will meet Astrid from Sweden again after Siem Reap to get some info avout diving schools! And to chat what happened between Cambodia and Chiang mai. I have a feeling it might be a long night!