{"id":790,"date":"2014-01-30T10:56:16","date_gmt":"2014-01-30T10:56:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/radcopter.com\/brianandmarisa\/worldtrip\/?p=790"},"modified":"2022-02-09T14:45:53","modified_gmt":"2022-02-09T14:45:53","slug":"phetcha-what-visiting-buddha-caves-off-the-beaten-path-in-phetchaburi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/texandtia.com\/worldtrip\/index.php\/2014\/01\/30\/phetcha-what-visiting-buddha-caves-off-the-beaten-path-in-phetchaburi\/","title":{"rendered":"“Phetcha-what?”: Visiting Buddha Caves Off the Beaten Path in Phetchaburi"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before heading back to Bangkok from Koh Tao, we decided to make a quick stop in a little known town called Phetchaburi (not pronounced as I had originally hoped as “fetch-a-booty”, but \u00a0“petch-a-boordy”.) There is pretty much only one reason for coming to Phetchaburi as a tourist: To see Buddhas in caves. Fortunately, this was the only reason Brian and I needed to stop here.<\/p>\n

The main cave in Phetchaburi is called Khao Luang Cave \u00a0There are over 150 Buddha statues in this cave, most of which were built in the cave in the 1800s. There is a large hole in the middle of the cave which allows light to come in, and nicely illuminates the statues.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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The main part of the cave with the light streaming in from above.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Lit Buddha at the cave’s entrance. You can see the large reclining Buddha in the back peeping through the hole to the right.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Row of Buddhas.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Buddha in a stalagtite.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At the entrance to Khao Luang\u00a0Cave are tons and tons of monkeys! Even though we had spent time at the monkey temple in Jaipur and had seen a lot of monkeys in India, this was still exciting to us. Brian also bought some bananas to feed them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Cuddling monkeys.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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“Just eating a banana on a pole. Nothing to see here.”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Hungry monkeys!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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He’s coming for you…<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Brian feeding the monkeys.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There is a smaller and less known Buddha cave in Phetchaburi that we also decided to visit. This one is located in a still used monastery. After walking past a menacing dog that a really old monk called off from growling at us, we made it to the entrance of the cave. While much smaller than Khao Luang, we enjoyed that we were the only ones in the cave (excluding the bats). \u00a0We also had fun wandering around what seemed like a completely empty monastery and discovered an abandoned temple. We climbed up to the top for a beautiful view of the city.<\/p>\n

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The entrance to the cave.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Glowing Buddha in the cave.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Brian lighting incense at the altar.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Buddha with an umbrella on the altar. Many of the statues in this cave looked quite different from the ones in the Khao Luang Cave.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Looking at the view from the top of the abandoned temple.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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There was a massive Buddha at the top of the abandoned temple covered in scaffolding and partially painted gold. It was weird that they seemed to have completely stopped before finishing.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After walking around the caves we were starving, and stumbled across a market with tons of ready to eat hot food. We had been concerned about being able to find vegetarian things in places like these in Thailand, but had no trouble finding a decent selection of delicious dishes.<\/p>\n

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The food market.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Bamboo shoots and cabbage.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Pumpkin and vermicelli noodles with mixed vegetables. Pumpkin is a surprisingly common vegetable to get here and we have found it served like this on its own and also in curries. I don’t think I’ve ever had it in a Thai dish back in the US.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Brian thoroughly enjoyed his market lunch.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On a completely different note, we recently discovered an easier way to upload pictures into our blog posts when the internet is slow, and this post is the first time we have used this method. However, we are not sure what type of impact it will have on those of you reading the blog, so please let us know if you have any trouble viewing the images in this post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before heading back to Bangkok from Koh Tao, we decided to make a quick stop in a little known town called Phetchaburi (not pronounced as I had originally hoped as “fetch-a-booty”, but \u00a0“petch-a-boordy”.) There is pretty much only one reason for coming to Phetchaburi as a tourist: To see Buddhas in caves. Fortunately, this was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,16,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-places","category-seasia","category-thailand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/texandtia.com\/worldtrip\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/texandtia.com\/worldtrip\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/texandtia.com\/worldtrip\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/texandtia.com\/worldtrip\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/texandtia.com\/worldtrip\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=790"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/texandtia.com\/worldtrip\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1677,"href":"https:\/\/texandtia.com\/worldtrip\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790\/revisions\/1677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/texandtia.com\/worldtrip\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/texandtia.com\/worldtrip\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/texandtia.com\/worldtrip\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}