Friday, October 3, 2014

Thailand Day 2 - Part Three

End of day 2!
From the Marble Temple we stopped following that guide, and looked at a map and decided to just take a really big circle and walk back towards our hostel and just see what we could see. And then we saw signs for the Golden Mount and thought hey, that sounds vaguely familiar from a blog post I’d read, and we headed that way!

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That’s pretty much an exact model of what it is 8D

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Just a hill in the middle of the city!

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You walk up around it, but I was picturing that one temple in India we went to where I had a really hard time with the altitude so was up for the climb but also dreading it!

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It ended up not being bad at all, I think this is the steepest bit.

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It’s actually a really relaxing climb, for the bottom there are all these plants around, so pretty and calming!

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There were periodic landings with bells

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I’m not sure what the symbolism is, but people would walk by and ring them all. From a distance it was really pretty, but up close it was way too loud XD

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Halfway there! Ish.

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A pretty gentle incline.

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Great views along the way though!

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At the top there’s a building, I’m not really sure what was in it because we thought we’d be going down the same way we came up, and wanted to just keep going up. In front of the building though there were PILES of shoes. And that sign.

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Then we went up a very narrow staircase, to this! The golden part of the Golden Mount :D

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I’m not really sure what deity it’s for, but the 360 view was really nice, and they didn’t seem to care that most people were there for that.

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The base of the mount was covered in fabric and had these pins on it. Again, I have no idea what it means.

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Again with the bells! I wish I knew what they meant. Apparently you could buy bells in the building we passed through, and hang them here.

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We pretty much just took pics of the scenery and relaxed for a bit.

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And then began the walk down!

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More bells! You can’t really tell, but I’m pretty sure Jey’s expression is “Are you really going to ring more bells?”

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From there we walked for awhile, on a mission to find food. This was on the map as The Giant Swing. I’m not sure how it’s a swing, but it is giant.

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Across from it is this, which is “The longest Royal Capitol’s name of the world.”

Anyway, food!

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I don’t remember what it actually was, other than DELICIOUS.

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But spicy ;_;
Not super spicy, but spicy to me XD

We were in the Khaosan Rd area, and just wandered looking at shops.

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And getting ice cream (the durian btw, was gross).

SO, then it’s getting dark and thre’s a lot of little alleys and such and we’d just been going and weren’t sure where we were anymore. So we were trying to get back to Khaosan Road… and we see this sign, like a large poster and it says “Shortcut to Khaosan Road.” So we follow it.. and gradually there’s less people, then it takes us into this shady looking alley… but I go forward because I see another sign… then it says to go up these stairs into a building aaaand we turned around. Nope.

I wish I’d taken pictures to properly convey the shadiness of the area.
We found out later though that it’s a legit thing, and maaaaybe we’d have tried it during daylight, but as dark as it was, no thanks.

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But we did make it back, AND we got sticky rice and mango, so success.

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