opium and temples

we went to an opium museum that was funded by the queen of thailand (the princess mother); pictures were not allowed unfortunately. it was a really neat museum located on a mountain side as far north as you can go within thailand. the entrance is on one side, then you walk through the mountain through a 180 meter tunnel with scary art carved into the stone (maybe bad hallucinations?). you come out onto the other side in the museum and go through multiple floors explaining the history of opium, how it spread through the world, how the british used it to suppress the chinese, and how it suppressed the thai people. all in all it was a really enlightening experience of something i knew very little about.

what really summed up the experience was going to a temple a short way from the museum that sat on the river. after ogling at the gigantic buddha we noticed a fork in the massive river. from standing on the temple you could see the actual golden triangle. on one side was burma, the other laos, and we stood on thailand.

note the golden temple and the chemical factory on the burmese side of the river.

just outside of chiang mai there is a massive botanical garden we visited, where we picked up food poisoning. the gardens were amazing (not organic i believe), they had gardens from all over the world and from all of the major climates. they also had a 18,000,000 baht temple (or so tang told us).

foxglove!

the desert place was hot. we had enough of that one.

zoe hid in a small hole on the side of a pagoda attempting to scare tang.

we also went to this temple, notice the hands reaching up from hell around zoe on the ground.

this is... the bathroom.

lanterns.

this town clock is by the same artist that did the temple just above.

mmmm....