Buddha Park

I'm backtracking a bit on the chronology of the blog to write more about Laos.  Besides the beautiful waterfall where I broke my finger, another highlight of the trip was Buddha Park.  While other members of our group stayed with our tour guide to hit the prime shopping boutiques of Vientiane, a small group of us hired a van and driver to go to Buddha Park.  Although we could have taken a public bus or hailed a tuk tuk (an open-air motorized rickshaw), it turned out to be prescient to have the van.  Because the road there was BuMpY!  It brought Jeremy and me back to our time in Kenya, bouncing around in a safari jeep on rutted roads.  The driver claimed that the government purposefully didn't fix that road because of the number of vehicle fatalities that used to occur when drivers sped down the smooth asphalt.  Perhaps...

After being thoroughly jostled, we arrived at Buddha Park.  The park was created in the late 1950s by monk Luang Phu Bunlua Sulilat as a way of sharing his philosophy of life and interpretation of the cosmos.  Buddha Park is actually an inaccurate name since the park includes statues of both Buddhist and Hindu images.

Upon entering, the first structure that caught our eye was the pumpkin tower.  

Jeremy entered the pumpkin tower through the mouth of the demon head.

Inside the mouth was Hell and from there, Jeremy climbed ladders and stairs through Earth to reach Heaven on top.  I learned that on Wikipedia.  Walking through it myself, I had no idea I was transcending the levels of the universe; I was only aware that the entire interior was hellish with cobwebs and steep stairs.  But the top did offer a heavenly view of all the quirky statues of the park.

Back on the ground, we couldn't resist taking silly pictures with the statues.