Three days in Chiang Rai: what the five hour day trip misses

The old town first, on foot, and it takes an afternoon. Wat Phra Kaew is the important one and looks like nothing much: a quiet Lanna compound of dark wood and low roofs a few streets from the centre. In the fifteenth century lightning struck the chedi here and split the plaster covering an old stucco Buddha, and underneath was jade. That image is the Emerald Buddha, it went from here to Lampang, Chiang Mai, Vientiane and eventually Bangkok, and it is the single most venerated object in Thailand. A jade replica made in the 1990s stands in the hall here now.

Fifteen minutes north west, Wat Phra That Doi Chom Thong sits on the low hill above the Kok River. The chedi on top holds a relic said to predate the city entirely, and the point of coming is that this is where Mangrai is supposed to have stood when he chose the site. The city pillar shrine beside it is a modern arrangement of stone columns and it is a good place to watch the river go by.

Wander back through the centre in the evening. The night bazaar starts filling at six, and the food is at the back rather than at the entrance.

Three artists, three obsessions, three very different buildings, all within about twenty kilometres. Doing them in one day is the whole reason to sleep here rather than pass through.

Start south at the White Temple, at opening, because the coaches from Chiang Mai arrive from about ten and the place stops working when it is full. Chalermchai Kositpipat began rebuilding a ruined temple here at the end of the 1990s and has been adding to it ever since, entirely at his own expense, in white plaster set with mirrored glass that throws light in all directions. You cross a bridge over a pit of outstretched hands to reach the ordination hall, which is the point: the hands are desire, and you are meant to walk over them without turning back. Inside, the murals run from traditional Buddhist imagery into aeroplanes, superheroes and film characters. The earthquake of 2014 damaged it badly enough that he considered pulling it down. He did not.

North of town, Baan Dam is the opposite in every way. Thawan Duchanee, a national artist who died in 2014, spent decades assembling nearly forty black buildings in wood, brick and concrete, and filled them with animal hides, buffalo horns, skulls, snakeskins and enormous tables. It is not a temple, whatever the tour operators say. It is a very dark artist's estate and it is genuinely unsettling in places, which is the intention.

Finish at Wat Rhong Sua Ten on the way back into town, in the late afternoon. The blue temple is the youngest of the three, built by a local artist who worked under Chalermchai, and the interior is the reason to come: every surface ultramarine and gold, with a white seated Buddha at the far end that the colour makes appear to float.

One more before you leave, and it is visible from most of the town. Wat Huay Pla Kang sits on a hill north west of the centre and is dedicated to Guan Yin, the bodhisattva of compassion, in the Chinese rather than the Thai tradition, which is why the whole compound looks as though it has been imported from Yunnan.

There are three things on the hill: a nine storey pagoda with dragon staircases and a different shrine on every floor, a Buddha hall below it, and the statue itself, a white figure twenty five storeys high with a lift running up inside her to a viewing window in her head. From up there the flat green plain of the Kok valley runs off north towards the border.

It is a short detour from the road to the airport, which makes it the obvious last stop rather than a special trip.