Buddh-o-lantern

After another quiet sleep in we ran a few errands in the morning to book train tickets and flights to southern Thailand. We bought some sandwiches from the Scandinavian bakery and caught a tuk tuk to Buddha park (Xieng Kuan).

Buddha Park is a rather bizarre place with lots of statues. Most of them are Buddhas but there are some other significant Buddhist and Hindu figures. The statues are scattered around a grassy area and appear to be quite old. This is due to poor construction as most are just reinforced cement that is crumbling. It was built in 1958 by a weirdo monk. The shining star of Buddha Park is a giant concrete pumpkin with a dead tree on top. We entered the pumpkin at ground level and worked our way up to the top for a view over the park. To get down you go through the center of the pumpkin through heaven, earth and hell. We had flashbacks of our trip through hell on the Yangze river. The pumpkin looked like it should have been in a Tim Burton movie.

After surviving hell once again we sat with a local guy who wanted to practice his English. He has been studying for 2 years and spoke quite well. He wanted to refine his pronunciation and phonetics. He was a monk briefly for 3 weeks but he found it too difficult to adhere to the rules. To get to school he has to travel on a public bus and it is too crowded for him not to be touched by other people.

We took our tuk tuk back to town and passed the Beer Lao brewery and wondered if they did tours, but alas we did not stop. We had dinner at our local pub, which was average as they didn't char the meat as we asked.