The Golden Mount is a temple on top of a small hill or mount where one can get sweeping views of the city. My tuk-tuk driver left me to explore the Golden Mount temple while he waits for me below. There is a spiral staircase that goes around the mount and up to the top giving visitors a 360 view of Bangkok from this area. It was a interesting place to build a temple and I thought they made proper use of the location.
The temple doesn’t look much like a traditional temple but it has a lot of Buddha statues inside, and I guess to prove that this is not too much of a tourist trap, there are actual worshippers here and in fact very little foreingers. It is forbidden to use footwear in the temple premises but it was okay to just leave them outside. The temple was quite spacious considering that this was on top of a hill.
You can see the great variety of Buddha statues here, some look brand new and some look quite old. There were the group of green Buddhas which I assume were carved from jade and a Buddha which was disfigured by layers of gold leaf plastered on it. This was the same fate of some Buddha statues which I saw in Myanmar. I wonder what makes that particular Buddha so special while the others do not get the gold leaf treatment.
[xmlgm {http://www.worldwanderings.net/kml/WatSaket.kmz}]