Broken Buddha of Wat Phra Singh

Broken Buddha of Wat Phra Singh
Originally uploaded by Bill Bevan
A Buddha statue lies apparently abandoned below a Bhodi tree in the grounds of Wat Phra Singh. However, he is far from forgotten. Taken at 3.30pm in the afternoon.

Bangkok City-Break

The King and I


Demon of the Royal Palace


Lotuses in Jim Thompson's Garden

We are back in Bangkok for the weekend. We’re passing through on our way to Trat and the islands in the eastern Gulf of Thailand. An overnight stop makes the long journey from western to eastern Thailand bearable. Two nights and we have time to see a couple of our favourite places from our time in Bangkok in 2004. These are Jim Thompson’s House and the Grand Palace with Wat Phra Kaew.


Standing in Jim Thompson's Garden behind his House

Jim Thompson was an international man of mystery. He came to Thailand to help liberate it from the Japanese at the end of WW2 but the war ended before he arrived so he worked in the region for the precursor of the CIA. On retirement he stayed in Bangkok where he helped to revive the silk industry and built a beautiful house out of five traditional Thai teak houses, furnished with Thai and Chinese antiques and surrounded it with a tame and cool jungle garden. This was 1959. Eight years later he went missing during a walk in Malaysia, never to be seen again. His house is an elegant legacy to Thai style and his own tastes.


Golden statue in Wat Phra Kaew

The Grand Palace was the home of the Kings of Thailand until recently. This massive walled sanctuary in the centre of old Bangkok is now the major tourist attraction in town. The ridges of elegant traditional steeply pitched red-tiled Thai roofs break the skyline one after the other. They compete with technicolour prangs and golden chedis to dazzle with their gold and enamel splendour. There can be few places in the world with such sumptuous architecture that renders the art of the most beautiful handwoven silks into wood, stone and clay.


Wat Demons?



The jewelled highlight of the Palace is the Royal Temple – Wat Phra Kaew. Westminster Abbey falls into the Wats deep shadow by comparison, little more than a dusty parish church next to an eruption of rubies, sapphires, emeralds and gold. Multi-hued enamel-coated demons hold up towering prangs next to the three wats that are giant jewellery boxes turned inside out. The gorgeous serene faces of mythical creatures that are half-bird and half-woman stalk the terraces in between. The Emerald Buddha, a jade statue, sits high up on a golden mound of lotus buds and attracts Thai pilgrims to pray at its feet at the very spiritual heart of the Thai Kingdom.


Ramakian Monkey


Sitting with Queen Sita



This exquisite world of make believe is enclosed within four walls on which the story of the Ramayama, known as the Ramakian in Thailand, is rendered in gold leaf pictures that together must form one of the largest figurative paintings in the world. The skill of the craftsmanship, the ornate detail, the epic scale of the story and sheer size re breathtaking. Stroll around the cool cloisters in front of this work and behold a tapestry of colour that makes the Bayeux Tapestry look like a well-stiched hankerchief. The dazzling art and architecture will hold you through the heat and beyond hunger to be refreshed and fed by splendour meant for the minds of kings.


Restoring the Ramakian

Word and Violin and Hebden Bridge

A trip up the A629 on Friday, a first visit to Hebden Bridge, a reunion with Colm and Pireeni who we met in Honduras, an evening of poetry and violin. A day when different places, different times collided in West Yorkshire.

We had met Pireeni and Colm on a bus in Honduras between Christmas and New Year 2008. A conversation was struck, a friendship forged over bumpy hill roads. She is Anglo-Tamil Sri Lankan, he Irish and they live together in San Francisco. Amongst many things, she is a poet and he a fiddle composer/player who go by the name of Word and Violin. By luck or fate they were booked to play the Hebden Bridge Arts Festival only 50 miles or so north of Sheffield and we had the happy opportunity to meet again. No buses, no bumpy roads but lots of hills.

Their concert entertained, provoked thought, informed and transported across the globe, meeting again and again in the common threads of Sri Lankan and Irish history and politics. They are worth catching if they play near where you live. Even better for us, was the chance of reacquainting - in tea shops, on hills, by canals, while walking.

www.wordandviolin.com