Waterfalls and White Temples

This morning we booked our trip to Luang Prabang in Laos. Gotta love that name, the way it rolls off the tougue - quite anomalous compared to the tongue-twisting tone-trickyness of Thai.
Following that, we rented a scooter. We rode out to Kuhn Kohn waterfall, about 30k from town, and hiked the trail to the waterfall. It was quite impressive. It was so powerful that it was quite difficult to get close to the bottom of the falls - there was so much spray and wind blast. I went for a swim in the pools further downstream. It was incredible: we had the place to ourselves, and as I looked around and saw this massive waterfall in a lush tropical rainforest, swimming in the refreshingly cool water, I thought to myself: life is good.

We then headed over to Wat Rong Khun (aka, The White Temple). En route I set a new personal best - 70km/h on a scooter. As the temple came into view, our jaws dropped; it was stunning. This is a recent temple, begun in 1998, and though it employs a lot of classical Thai architectural elements, it was also quite avant gard. For starters, unlike all other wats which multi-coloured and gold-gilded, this one is completely white. It looked like an ice palace that belonged on the South Pole. Carole and I both agree that is one of the most amazing temples we've seen here in Thailand. It is still a work in progress, though, as the interior it still being completed.
The front of the interior is the standard massive buddha statue and associated shrines with smaller statues. The back wall, was quite unconventional. It was a large mural which seemed to personify the battle between good and evil, and had such elements as Skylab, Neo from the Matrix, jet fighters, and Terminator-like characters. One of the most interesting sections was a smouldering set of WTC towers, with a snake body wrapped around one that metamorphosed into a gas pump hose, with the nozzle of the pump dripping gas onto the tongues of emaciated faces.
I kind of wondered about the 'classiness' of having pop images and icons on a mural like that, but that's probably always been the case - today's pop images are tomorrows classics. However, I still wonder if the eyes gazing on this mural will recognize Neo as such 500 years from now, especially if those eyes belong to electronic beings who have enslaved the human race by then.