The temple of ten thousand skulls

One doesn't have to travel enormous distances in Thailand to come across unusual and bizarre places. Take, for example, Wat Hua Krabeu on the outskirts of Bangkok, which hasn't even made it into that traveller's bible, "The Lonely Planet Guide to Thailand".

The temple's abbot, Phra Khru Wiboonpattankit, is an avid collector, and his penchant for collecting the rare, valuable, and unusual landed him in really hot water a few years ago when he turned the temple grounds into an automotive museum specialising in vintage Mercedes Benz limousines. He was mercilessly pilloried by the press who claimed that monks, especially abbots, had no right to accumulate wealth on such a grand scale. Investigations were held and eventually he was exonerated but today remains quite annoyed about the whole affair.

"All I was trying to do," he claims,  "was establish a place where these beautiful old machines could be resurrected and preserved for posterity, instead of just being sold off as scrap metal. People would bring me their old cars, and some mechanics who were devotees of the temple would teach the novices the fine art of restoring antique motor cars. After all, one has to be realistic. Not all the novices who arrive here will stay in the monkhood forever. What I was doing was teaching them a useful skill that would be beneficial to them when they left the temple."

Eventually all the fuss died down and his superiors were convinced that his motives were pure, so now the temple has a veritable armada of vintage vehicles numbering about one hundred that Phra Khru Wiboonpattankit has collected over the past 20 years. They can be admired by visitors, as well as representing an ongoing commitment to the education of generations of novices for years to come.

Now he can concentrate on his next pressing project, a grand monument to the Asian water buffalo, which has been having a bit of a hard time of late. It seems that more and more people are acquiring a taste for buffalo steak, with around 400,000 buffalo currently slaughtered for their meat each year. Most are females, many of them pregnant. The males are kept for their strength and castrated to increase their size and value as draft animals. This reduces the breeding stock even further.

Consequently the lot of the Asian water buffalo is not a happy one. Their population has declined from an estimated six million in 1987 to 1.8 million in 1999 and some experts have predicted the creature could be extinct in Thailand within 10 years. They may soon only be seen at the annual buffalo races in Chonburi where they put on a riotous performance and are capable of a surprising turn of speed.

 In fact show business runs in some buffalo blood. In 2001 a buffalo who had the longest horns of any of his kind in Thailand played a very significant role in the movie "Bang Rajan", a stirring tale about the invasion of Thailand by Burma in 1767, with music by the famous Thai group Carabao. Sadly, a few months after the film was finished, the quadruped thespian died. He was given a hero's send off, his funeral even making the newspapers and television news bulletins. The members of Carabao were presented with his horns as a memento.

 Phra Khru Wiboonpattankit is determined that the buffalo's contribution to agriculture and show business over the years will not go unrewarded, even if that reward is posthumous. He's planned a two-storey structure topped with a magnificent spire at the temple, which will be a shrine to buffalo. There, all sorts of buffalo memorabilia will be displayed to admiring masses.

To reach the actual building one will travel through a tunnel constructed of buffalo skulls. It's been estimated that it will take 10,000 skulls to create this architectural wonder, so there's a bit of a way to go yet. Contributions have been coming at a steady rate from the nearby village of Buffalo Head whose onceflourishing population of the beasts is steadily dwindling through old age. Phra Khru Wiboonpattankit prefers skulls from animals that have died a natural death as opposed to those that have met a sticky end at the abattoirs.

So, if you have the odd buffalo skull lying around the house and are in a bit of a quandary as to what to do with it, Phra Khru Wiboonpattankit will happily take it off your hands and you'll know it's gone to a good home.

Incidentally, Phra Khru Wiboonpattankit was on the right track all along. Several novices who took advantage of his training scheme have since left Wat Hua Krabeu and are now running successful automotive workshops specialising in … you guessed it, Mercedes Benz repair jobs.