Bangkok, day two: Wat Suthat and the Giant Swing

After I left Wat Phony I walked all the way around the National Museum, the royal palace and Wat Phra Kaew. Seemed to take hours, though it was barely one. No tuk-tuks today, remember? I'd promised myself. 

I'd originally intended to tour the palace and Wat Phra Kaew, but I changed my mind when I came around the corner of the palace wall and saw the pulsating throng crowding the main gate. White tourists buses kept rolling up and disgorging clamoring heaps of pudgy, fatuous, ridiculously-dressed Asian and European tourists, and I "couldn't get no show" as Mark Twain would say. I walked on, past the museum, fighting my way through the stagnant afternoon heat, trailing a japing pack of young Thai army cadets on a long and completely unnecessary detour around Saranrom Park. I probably should've stopped and strolled through this park, but didn't because another pack of army cadets was doing drills in it and I didn't want to have anything to do with the military while I was here. 

On the east side of the park I was accosted by a plain-clothed policeman of Chinese descent with a bristly, pencil-thin mustache and a whiny, nasally voice who wanted me to walk (or rather, hire a tuk-tuk) to take me to the giant standing Buddha at Wat Intharawihan. I nodded, said I'd consider it, and walked north to Wat Suthat (and the Giant Swing, which isn't really a swing at all). 

In this temple, I found Nirvana—or the closest thing to it on such a hot, miserable, swampy day. I sat down on the red velvet floor and gazed contemplatively over the enormous sitting Buddha, with his long earlobes and his languorous hooded eyes and his lips tinged with that old Angkor smile. I liked Wat Suthat better than any other temple I'd been in, and I've been to temples in six Asian countries. I've been to temples with Buddha statues of solid emerald and floors of pure silver, temples with heaps of glittering gold artifacts sitting at the Enlightened One's feet, temples saturated with the smell of incense and washed with the rays of the sun and the spray of the sea. To blazes with them all; I liked Wat Suthat. 

It was quiet. It was peaceful. It was airy and breezy and cool. There were hardly any phonies. The ceiling was high and vaulted and had all the quiet reverential quality of a church. The pillars and walls were coated in scenes depicting the life and trials of the prince Siddhartha, fantastically intact after all this time. There were a few worshipers—old men, mostly—quietly meditating and bowing. Electric fans hummed soothingly away in the background. I sat on the temple grounds for 40 minutes and inside the temple proper for 15, just soaking up the atmosphere (and drying off after my long walk).