Day 4

We started our day by using the same tour company as yesterday since they were so great. They picked us up at the hotel at 8:30 and brought us to our first stop: Su tep Temple.

We took a cable car up to the temple.

I was fascinated by the Buddhist monks and their way of life and kept asking our tour guide Su Tep about it.; he has the same name as the temple; it translates to Holy. At around 8 years old, the children spend a week at a temple and decide after that if they want to become a monk for life. They’re considered old enough to make that decision. The monks are celibate their whole life and shave their head and eyebrows. They are allowed to leave the monkhood and even return if they want to later on but they can only do that twice.
The last Buddha was alive around 2500 years ago and they already know the name of the next Buddha who will be alive in around 2400 years. A fortune teller informs the father that their son will be a great leader of people and that’s how they know he’s the Buddha.
The previous Buddha was originally a prince. At age 23 he decided the palace was too small for him and wanted to learn about the world. He left and learned about many cultures. At age 60 he was sitting under a tree, looking at the leaves and wondered if he really knew enough to lead many people. A person came up to him and after 5 minutes of speaking with him, decided to become the first monk of his and learn from him. There were 5 monks under that Buddha and they spread his teachings.
(This was all told to me by the tour guide in good but broken English so there may be a lot of inaccuracies but the overall gist I’m pretty sure I got)

We walked around the temple and saw an incredible view of Chiangmai. We happened to be there the day that the fourth Buddha had sat under that tree: the full moon day of the sixth month.




We heard traditional Thai music

We took the stairs on the way back down

On the way to the sticky waterfall we stopped at a local market and saw some pretty wild things

We drove to the sticky waterfall and ate lunch with our group. Our tour guide showed off his Hebrew he knows from giving so many tours to Israelis

We then climbed both down the waterfall and back up

Right next to the waterfall was a quick 5 minute walk to a symbolic spring

After our one night stay in a really great hostel we’re switching to our hotel about 15 minutes away from chabad for Shabbat which has an incredible view from our room. Excited for the first weekend!