Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Even more templing...


Day 77: The countryside, waterfalls, and temples

This morning we had breakfast and headed out early again on our tuktuk to a few places a bit further out of town. We drove through a lot of beautiful countryside, where we watched people just living their daily lives. We drove by rice fields where people were picking rice, and villages where families were were all sitting together outside, people sleeping on hammocks, kids of all ages running around playing in the streets, and people just enjoying life. It was inspiring.

We arrived at our first stop, where we hiked up about 1.5km to a small waterfall and river. The cool thing about this waterfall was that there were Shivalingas carved into the entire riverbed on which the water runs – as such, it was called the River of a Thousand Lingas! We walked along the river and saw other ancient carvings along the riverbed, and then walked down to the foot of the waterfall. Then, we hiked back to the tuktuk and went to our next destination, an old red sandstone temple. The temple was in pretty good condition considering the ruins we have seen before and the restoration work that was done on it was impeccable! We walked around the temple grounds and saw some rice paddy fields, had some lunch, and then headed back to our hotel.

We relaxed a bit, and then went to town and walked around the night market before having dinner and going back to our hotel.
Picking rice in the rice paddy

River of a thousand lingas

Temple ruins

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