* kseniadas: Thailand: Good Luck for You. - Day 5 (Doi Sudthep Mountain)

It’s absolutely true that after so many early mornings one needs some rest from vacations, too! So, we first visited Hmong hilltribe village. They were cleaning up the road as we arrived, preparing it for the new year celebration. By the way, according to the local calendar we live in the year 2555 (according to which, the end of the world has passed already! YAY!)

Normally, the village people normally wear black velvet jackets with pink border and skirts or wide pants with a kind of embroidery. However, due to the upcoming festivities, we wore more colorful lower parts adorned with intricate embroidery and also colorful hats with a fringe of bead threads. New Year, after the rice harvest is the most important ceremony of the year and you will often see the people wearing silver, which is a sign of wealth. The Hmong men are well-known silversmiths, while Hmong women are skillful embroiderers and weavers.

The whole central walkway was turned into a marketplace, something we are already getting used to. The only thing making Thais different from Arabic countries, is that they don’t shout or try to grab you by the arm to attract to their stall.

Hmong hilltribe girls

This people is quite new in Thailand. They originally come from Southern China (which gets quite obvious from their facial features). As they settled high in the mountains, they engaged in growing opium. However, if you were hoping to get a joint there, don’t get too enthusiastic: after a while their activity was prohibited by the King and re-qualified into growing crops and tea (famous oolong). Recently they’ve been converted into full-pledged Thais with the right for education and work in towns.

On the other, Chinag-Mai-facing side of the mountain huge multi-headed snakes, ‘guarding’ high stairs, run from the top to the bottom on both sides, leading to the emblematic temple called Doi Sudthep, the most sacred place in Nothern Thailand.

According to the legend, a Buddist monk had a vision, according to which we had to find a relic. In the end he found what was considered to be Buddha’s bone and had magical properties. The King of the Lanna Kindom (one of the 3 kingdoms that now make up Thailand) got interested in the finding and when the bone split in two (I told you it was magical), he placed the bigger part on the back of a white elephant and released it into the jungle. The elephant wandered up to the top of the Doi Suthep where he made 3 circles and died afterwards. So, the King regarded it to be a sign and ordered to build here a temple.

When in Thailand, do as Thais do. So, we took off our shoes & got ourselves the traditional ‘praying set’: lotus flowers, candles and incense sticks. Lotus flowers (which are widely substituted by water lilies) represent Buddha’s teaching & symbolize enlightenment.

After going 3 times clockwise around the central golden Chedi (reciting a Buddhist prayer, or in my case Gayatri matra), you finally light up the candles and the incense sticks and leave the lotus flower to the Buddha statue. So, doing my rounds around the chedi, I noticed the same bells I saw handing from the roofs in Bangkok temples, but this time you could see them everywhere around and the leaf below had inscriptions written by the visitors. And again, with every rush of wind – there we go: sweet gentle clinging fills the air.

Afterwards a monk blessed the visitors and tied a white string around our wrists: ‘good luck for you’, he smiled. In fact, in case of women, his helper tied the strings: monks are not allowed to touch women.