Dinner, for me, at the Sunday Night Market in Chiang Mai means Wat Phan On. The perimeter of the courtyard is lined with food booths, with just about any local market food you can wish for and all at incredibly cheap prices its the best way to start off an evening at the market. Out of all the wats in the area, Phan On has the biggest selection of food and there are lots of tables so you can sit down to gorge yourself too. I try something different on each visit, but always finish off with fried bananas. The lady who usually runs her booth there drizzles the piping hot fruit with a coconut icing that is to die for. Unfortunately she isn’t always there. That means a sad face and a quick jaunt across the street for a more run of the mill fried banana dessert (though being served in a small bag makes for a great treat to munch on while you wander through the rest of the market – at least until you hit another food vendor’s booth offering something too delicious to pass up).

Wat Phan On with its golden chedi and matching Buddha sitting under the tree is a more picturesque temple for dining. The one across the street is dark, small, and as soon as you get your food you want to leave. Even just walking down the street during the day Wat Phan On grabs your attention while it’s slatternly neighbor offers nothing to recommend a visit. Even a quick one. Even its sign on the dirty plaster wall suggests a temple in dire need of some attention. But then even the crummiest looking temple often holds a surprise or two, so late one afternoon strolling nowhere slowly I finally decided to drop in and check out Wat Muen Larn. Its hidden surprise was that it was exactly as advertised: falling down and headed for despair.

Wat Muen Larn’s claim to fame is that it is old, that it is built in the Lanna style, and that it has a minor reputation as a place for traditional Thai massage. In a city filled with old temples built in the Lanna style, and with more traditional massage shops than 7/11s that’s not saying much. That Google returned 1,930,000,000 search results was impressive. Until I noted 192,1500,000 of those were because the search engine preferred results with either the word menu or learn in them. Narrowing the search down, the wat’s name appears in long lists of temples in Chiang Mai and in an two sentence article that mentions the massage thingy again, repeated a few hundred times. On the plus side that means this article will undoubtedly become the #1 result for future searches, though I may have been the first, and last person to have ever searched Google for info on Wat Muen Larn.

Of the red roof / white wall school of Thai temples, and badly in need of a bath, the wat has a small wiharn, a small ubosot, a medium sized chedi with another smaller one next to it, and a tiny library. It also has the only dog in Thailand that has ever barked at me. Which considering how lethargic dogs are in Thailand could be a unique enough of an experience to recommend visiting the wat. There is also a lot of construction and renovation projects within the compound, begun in what looks like maybe the 1980s and still waiting for either funds or interest to see them completed.

Most of the paint, at least on those architectural details that were ever painted, is faded – a saving grace to my eye ‘cuz I like taking pictures of old weathered doors. And tucked away toward the back of the small compound is a set of doors and windows painted bright red and heavily decorated with gold leaf – not an unusual sight at Thai temples but considering how run down and beat up this wat is they look like they were pilfered from the much more ritzy Wat Phan On across the street. Which combined was reason enough to write an article about Wat Muen Larn.

Oh, and to warn you about the dog.

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