Thalang Road - Phuket, the big Buddha, and Wat Chalong

Thalang Road in Phuket town is the place to buy fabrics; there are plenty of fabric shops - and since we were paying a driver to take us there and back (via the big Buddha and Wat Chalong),  - we shopped from the first place we entered. It still took us an hour choosing fabrics for patchwork, and working out what we could buy for the cash we had taken with us. Here is Na our very patient driver -

and a lotus blossom

Carol chose 14 designs of fabric for patchwork, as well as another 10 large pieces of varying children's designs. Carol is sitting here saying "are you sure? there were only five." "No actually there were 10, there were 8 pieces of 4m lengths, and two pieces of two metre lengths, 14 lengths of 1.5m at a special discount, and one piece of 1m, as well as 3 metres of canvas for me  for painting.

We had to stop at Tesco on the way home to buy another suitcase - I was worried about the cost at this stage (!) since we had to pay the driver, and we purchased the cheapest one in the shop - I should not have worried, it worked out at 8 pounds, for some reason in the shop we thought it was 20 pounds.

The big Buddha in the hills north of Chalong is quite a sight. There are monks in orange robes blessing people in the temple of course, and thousands of small shiny brass bells tinkling in the wind, many of them bearing messages from people who purchase them to adorn the trees.

The big Buddha is possibly 100 metres tall, and clad in white marble or stone tiles, which have been polished and shaped exactly. They cover the surface like a mosaic. The Thai people on the island are still working to complete the whole project, which may yet take a year or more, and will look like this:

To get a sense of scale, here we are at the foot of the much smaller golden buddha  sitting on a coiled snake which is to the left of the big Buddha -

At Wat Chalong we stopped to visit the temple - there are several temples,

all quite stunning, and with sumptuous tropical gardens surrounding them. The place is quite serene and because the temples are filled with incense sticks and flowers, and quiet, it has a mystical atmosphere.

The buddhist worshippers coat the statues of the monks in temples with orange robes, and with small pieces of gold leaf.

and they surround the buddhas with lotus blossoms and incense sticks and yellow candles.

We hoped to see more buddhist monks and child monks, but only saw one or two.