Day 2 – Temple of Art

We left Chiang Rai for Chiang Mai in the morning. Our first destination was the White Temple. It was a very magnificent temple, with the intricate details of the structure and the pure white colour. The temple is a temple of art and not meant for any worship. We interviewed the security guards and taxi drivers in the area. The White Temple was in the news for Mainland Chinese tourists making the toilets unusable and the temple officials had to build new toilets to accommodate the tourists. It was interesting to see that a security outpost was built in order to control the behaviour of tourists in the temple area, such as not stepping onto the grass areas, not touching the temple structure and not taking photos in the temple. This was a direct cause of the unruly behaviour of the Chinese tourists. This is the first time in my life seeing a temple built not as a place of worship but an art exhibition. I wonder whether this temple was built to boost tourism and consequently, revenue. Apparently the temple is going to start charging tourists from October this year, reason given was that maintenance is costly. I hope that a place of worship has not become a tool to generate revenue.

Next we went to the Tiger Kingdom. Our group paid 500 baht for the walk and to get up close to the medium sized tigers. The experience was well worth it because I could not have had such close contact with tigers otherwise. The medium sized tigers were around 16 months old and considered young adults, thus they were not aggressive and in fact very friendly to visitors. We then walked around and saw the adult tigers and the cubs. Will such experiences promote animal conservation or will this encourage animal captivity to generate revenue? I hope it’s the former.

We did not expect the responses we got from the interviews and also the surveys. We expected the response to Mainland Chinese tourists to be negative but the responses so far were fairly positive. This prompted us to review our questions and the direction we would be heading in the research. We decided to include surveys as another tool to gather more data. It was quite uncomfortable to have the results differ so much from our expectations and having to review the whole project, but well, we learn along the way.