Carey’d Away…

We need visas to live in Thailand as expatriates and the ones we have require that we leave the country every 90 days.  This time we decided to drive north to the Burmese border, walk across, spend the required 30 minutes in Burma and walk back across to Thailand.  Rather that do it that directly, we thought it would be fun to see a bit of Northern Thailand in the process.  Day 1 took us to a beautiful town called Thaton.

 This is the view from our hotel, The Taton Chalet.

After we got checked in and settled, we headed back out in the car to go see the many Wat Thaton monuments.
The first interesting thing we found was Phra Sang-Krachai.

Parking here we walked up the short drive to the White Buddha, Buddha Nirandornchai.

Two boys, two buddhas, and a safe for offerings.
 

Mike enjoyed the view of Thaton from the White Buddha.

After photographing Mike I turned back around to find Matthew and Nathan - meditating?

From here we continued on well up the winding road until it became quite narrow. 
We had this view of Chedi Kaew and the valley on our descent.

We continued down to Chedi Kaew, a unique wat presently being constructed.

Chedi Kaew seems to architecturally be a mix of a traditional Buddhist Chedi and a Muslim Mosque.

Continuing down the hillside from here we stopped at the Standing Buddha.

From the carpark you have this beautiful peek through a frangipani tree back over to the Chedi Kaew.

The approach to his platform is from behind - quite an impressive statue.

Matthew and Nathan had a lot of energy from being in the car for so long, but remembered to take their shoes off and managed to stand still for a photo.

But then they eagerly ran to the lookout spot with the binoculars.

Mike snapped this photo of me

As I was about to take this photo of the valley.