Wat Arun, Wat Traimit, Kuan Yim Shrine

Getting from where I had lunch this morning near Wat Phra Kaew to my first stop of the afternoon, Wat Arun, involved walking to a nearby ferry dock and taking a ferry across the Chao Praya River. Leaving there, I took a couple of more ferries, one back across the river to connect to another going farther along the river, and then I had a bit of a walk from there to my next stop, Wat Traimit. From Wat Traimit, I walked to my next and last main stop, Kuan Yim Shrine.

It was an interesting afternoon.

Wat Arun

Wat Arun, yet another well-visited Bangkok temple, is almost right beside the river. I walked off the ferry dock and the ticket office for Wat Arun was pretty much right there.

The focus of the temple is a tall tower decorated with subdued porcelain mosaics. There are also four smaller towers surrounding it that are decorated the same way. It’s possible to climb partway up the bigger tower to a platform surrounding it. The steps are quite steep. I climbed them. But I wasn’t terribly comfortable going up or, particularly, going down. (I fear tumbling down much more than I fear tumbling up. Going up, the only issue was pushing my old legs up the height of the risers.)

There is also a shrine with a Buddha statue in Wat Arun.

Just outside of Wat Arun, there are some very peaceful and attractive grounds and buildings.

When I was there, there were several people in what I assume are traditional Thai ceremonial costumes. Some were couples. Others were mixed and same-sex groups. The couples and groups didn’t appear to be connected in any way.

I don’t know if they owned the costumes they were wearing. There were also some women walking around holding pages with collages of costumes that I assumed were available for rent.

Most of the people in costumes were having their pictures taken in and around Wat Arun. A few of the photos were shot using smartphones. I assume the photographers were friends or family.

But most of them were taken by professional photographers. I know they were professional photographers because they had big, fancy, schmancy dedicated cameras with big lenses, rather than smartphones that double as cameras. That and they wore vests emblazoned with “PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER” in English and I assume Thai, on the back of the vests. The cameras were a clue. The vests were the confirmation that they were indeed professional photographers.

Walking around, I came across a sign warning people that “for their safety” they should only have their pictures taken by professional photographers. For their safety? How many people have been injured by having their picture taken by an amateur photographer with a smartphone? I’m guessing not a lot.

From Wat Arun to Wat Traimit

As I mentioned in the introduction, getting from Wat Arun to Wat Traimit involved a couple of ferries and a bit of a walk. Part of that walk took me along a couple of connected streets like I’d never seen before.

The streets were relatively narrow and quite grungy. Small businesses lined both sides of them. A few of those businesses were fruit and vegetable vendors. One displayed primarily some model car and model motorcycle toys.

Most of the rest of the businesses were I don’t know what. Almost all of them had heaps of metal parts in their small shops and out front of them.

Some of that metal looked like motor vehicle engines or parts thereof. In one, it looked like they had some train axles. In most of the others, I couldn’t make heads nor tails of what the metal parts were in their former lives. In all cases, the parts looked like they had seen a lot of use in those past lives.

Talk about a street having character; that one sure did.

Just before getting to Wat Traimit I passed the Chinatown Gate. It’s what you’d expect of an ornamental gate to a Chinatown, except that it sits on a traffic island.

Wat Traimit

An unofficial, but probably better-known tourist name for Wat Traimit is the Golden Buddha Temple. It’s a structure of a few stories. The top level contains the shrine with the Golden Buddha. In the lower levels, they have an exhibit on the Golden Buddha. The exhibit has a separate entrance fee and it closes a half-hour before the Golden Buddha shrine.

I was there a few minutes before the exhibit was scheduled to close, but they wouldn’t sell me a ticket to the exhibit, only to the Golden Buddha.

The shrine is not all that large. It has some decorations other than the Buddha, but not a lot. But the Buddha is quite large.

Why, you might ask is it called the Golden Buddha? Is it because it’s gold-coloured? Well, yes, it is. But it’s not just that.

According to a leaflet handed out at the temple, the Buddha figure is over 700 years old. It was originally covered in plaster to hide it from an invading army. It had a bit of a journey since then, but in 1955 it was investigated and found to be made of pure gold. So, not just gold-coloured, but actually gold.

The leaflet says that at 12 feet, 5 inches in diameter and 15 feet, 9 inches tall—and weighing about 5.5 tons—it is the largest Golden Buddha image in the world. Imagine that.

Kuan Yim Shrine

Kuan Yim Shrine isn’t listed in my guidebook. I found it in my walking tour app when I used the “sort attractions by distance” feature after leaving Wat Traimit. It was on the way to the MRT station I had to get to to head back to my hotel.

It’s a small, simple but colourful shrine with murals depicting Chinese deities. If you’re in Bangkok it’s probably not worth going especially far out of your way to see the Kuan Yim Shrine, but if it’s just a trivial detour, such as it was for me today, it’s worth a look.

And with that, I hopped on the MRT and headed back to my hotel for my daily evening free wine and appetizers in the hotel’s executive lounge. Executive lounge. Hah. I used to be president of a company. But I was also the treasurer and secretary of the company. And I was its only employee. And now I’m retired and have been for about six years or so. I wonder if they’d give me executive lounge access if they knew that.