Wat Pho and Wat Arun
By Lauren Gerzina & Justin Hayes
More Temples, Orchids, and Lump Crab Pad Thai
It was time again for another walking tour. Bangkok is so huge (605 square miles and a population of over 10.7 million people) that you can’t really do a traditional walking tour – you have to pick a particular spot of the city. So we chose to do one that went to two of the most well-known temples in the city – Wat Pho and Wat Arun.
The temples were a basically on the opposite side of the city from our hotel and, after an unsuccessful attempt at getting a Grab during rush hour, we walked to the Metro system (MRT) to take the blue line. We were running a little late due to our impromptu travel plans, so Justin was WhatsApp-ing back and forth with the guide. She and the rest of the tour started right on time and she kept texting us her location with a picture and/or a selfie of her. We were only about 5 minutes late, though, so it was fine.
Long story short, the tour was pretty bad, and we didn’t really learn much about the temples. This needs a fact check, but going from our (not great) memories of the tour, we learned that Wat Arun was an older temple that was restored by a king at the site of the old royal palace . When the Royal Palace was moved across the river by King Rama I, Wat Pho was constructed as the new royal temple. Wat Pho is certainly larger and more ornate than Wat Arun, with four large stupas constructed to hold the remains of Rama I-IV. The fourth stupa is the largest, built by and for Rama IV, who closed off the area so no more stupas could be built after him.
Beyond that information, our tour guide was very knowledgeable about Buddhism, but was lackluster on the history of Thailand. She told us that a lot of the architecture was inspired by the Chinese due to Thailand and China’s trading history, and would randomly point at things and say, “That’s Chinese.” One area had a lot of statues of figures in various poses and costumes. When someone on our tour asked about the significance of them, her basic answer was, “they’re from China” but didn’t explain why they were there (we later learned from another tour guide on a completely different tour that the Chinese would give merchant ships random statues for free so that their ships had enough weight on them).
We would also ask her about Hindu symbols that we recognized from our tours in Cambodia, such as a linga statue we saw in a courtyard, and her response would be, “oh that’s Hindu, nothing to do with Buddhism.” Very helpful.
Still, the temples were very cool to look at, especially the large, gold reclining Buddha statue (which we can’t really tell you much about either other than it isn’t actually made of gold). Lauren also really enjoyed all of the orchids that were growing around the temples. Wat Arun had some very large stupas in an older architecture style, and we immediately noticed that this site was very popular for people to have photo shoots while wearing traditional Thai clothing. Lauren immediately got very excited and began scheming to figure out how we could take similar photos.
More on that later . . .
After our tour ended, we headed back across the water on a ferry back to the Wat Pho area and then scoped out to find a place for lunch. Come to find out, the restaurant we were looking for was all booked up for lunch, but one next door had similarly good reviews, so we popped in. We were seated at a table with a great view of the river and Wat Arun. Justin ordered Pad Thai with lump crab and Lauren had a beef curry. We also accidentally, but happily ordered giant pitchers of “signature” teas – Justin’s was like a peach tea and Lauren’s was a butterfly pea tea, which is a blue flower tea very popular in Thailand. Clearly, these pitchers were intended to share, but we thought they were single servings, but we didn’t mind as we were both quite thirsty.
Lauren found a gelato/sorbet place nearby, so we headed over there for a quick dessert. It wasn’t as amazing as the dark chocolate sorbet in Siem Reap, but it was still good. When our tour ended earlier, the guide asked what we wanted to do and Lauren had heard that there was a flower market nearby, so she told us where we could go for that. When we finished with our sorbet, we headed over to the flower market, which was about a 10 minute walk.
We walked around the market a bit and found a flower shop that was inside with A/C. It had a ton of flowers (and customers) and had some pretty orchids for sale on the second floor. When we walked outside, we saw some small flower arrangements (likely that people buy for offerings to Buddha at their local temple) so we got one to keep in our hotel room for the rest of our stay.
We decided it was time to walk to the MRT to head back to our hotel to get out of the heat of the afternoon.
Our evening was fairly uneventful since we were both pretty beat from the morning (and probably our quick traveling from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh to Bangkok in short succession). We went to the executive lounge again for dinner, walked around the park next to our hotel for a bit, watched the water fountain show with music, then headed back to the hotel to relax for the rest of the night.
