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Published: December 19th 2012
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We'd seen the islands and explored the north but seen only Bangkok in the middle and it was time to fix that. A 12 hour bus ride down to Bangkok was the first leg of the journey and then a 2 hour train ride for the second half. We'd not travelled by train yet in SE Asia so this was a first, and the train was no different to India just more room for the larger bum. It did travel undoubtedly faster than the Indian version and 2 hours later saw us arriving in Ayuthaya, one of the ancient Siam capitals.
We'd heard good things of Ayuthaya, from a good number of people but when we arrived it was far from what we expected! We've told ourselves so many times not to expect anything from anywhere, then everything is a bonus but again we were expecting things again. I'd visioned it being a really scenic city surrounded by a moat as we'd read. It was much more backwards than anywhere we had been in Thailand, maybe this is because its less touristic, I don't know. First impressions were not good, it is inundated with stray dogs, a lot of
them looking in very poor condition and hungry to say the least. You see them seeking shade in any possible place, doorways, underneath cars and underneath market stalls. One striking thing in Ayuthaya was the Tuktuk's, unlike any we had seen before, these must have been modelled by a Star Trek fan as you can see!
We found a place to stay for a mere 250baht or £5 and couldn't have stumbled on a nicer spot. Although the room comprised of a bed and a fan, the owner made up for this. she knew very little English and with our Thia 'Hello' and 'Thank you', communicating promised to be interesting. We needed a towel, which she understood as a foot massage and so international charades commences and this was how we got by along with a lot of chuckling!
I'll apologise now for the poor grammar and sentence structure, but I've not slept much over the last few days and got free time now to write this on the plane. Bear with it!
When we got away from the guesthouse and rented out bikes, the city unfolded to be similar to what we imagined, just on a larger scale and lacking a picturesque moat! The city is rammed full of pagodas and watts, of all shapes and sizes. We had a fall out and so spent the day on our own, Laura doesn't really like all the old stuff and I do, which is where we differ. When we found each other that night turns out we both did the same thing for the full day, exploring ruins. Many of them you had to pay for but both of us being expert money savers didn't part with a pound, sneaking in and jumping over walls. What you do to save literally a pound! We had made a target also out of not withdrawing anymore money before we left, giving us £30 a day for the 2 of us. We did it....at a push.
We were friends once again by the next day and took the bikes out to some more of the temples. However riding in 35+ degrees, there's only so long you can go before you've had enough, even more so with a rucksack on. I think we might have done 20km or something like tha in the 3 hours we were riding. Slow going. It would have been a better choice to get a scooter but we didn't want to push our luck after all the riding we did in Pai.
Other than that we found ourselves in Ayuthaya just before one of the years big festivals, therefore amongst the pre festival activities which consists of a lot of food markets and weird stalls. One thing caught our eye, a snake show, starting off with small cobras, progressing all the way through pythons and other medioka snakes and concluding with a king cobra, a good 4/5 meters long with a big hood. They didn't make the snakes do anything but sit there, occasionally flicking a black cloth near them to make them rise up and show their hood's. I loved it, just gutted that I didn't see one that big in all our escapades, I'll hunt them down in Australia!
There isn't much else to say on Ayuthaya, other than its got lots of temples, a river around 3 sides of it and not many places to eat. After Angkor Watt, none of the ruins compared well but its worth the visit. We only stayed a day, by that time we were templed out, ready to move on and headed back to Bangkok.
We met a guy on the train back who was going around the world in 80 days, and he seemed to us like he was on speed or another drug. We could barely get a word in, after he reeled off all his must see places to us! We did take note, but took more on the amount of bull coming out of his mouth. I'm not usually one to ignore someone but I left Laura with him and turned to Lord of the Rings. Not my cup of tea.
So back to Bangkok it was for us and after listening to our train friends advice (stupid I know), went to a cheap place! It was the most expensive area we had seen on our trip, paying a whopping £6 each for a dorm room. Not listening to a madman again. The area we were in called Silom was the business end of town, lots of shops and a big park. Really is worth a visit to see a different side to Bangkok. And the nightlife there is good, we stayed and spent way too much in an Irish bar with some of the ex pat guys, listening to their stories of how they ended up living here. One of which, an American man, moved here 23 years ago and has not worked a day since. He looked 50 max. Bit of a Hugh Grant from 'About a boy'!
We had a total of 2 days in Bangkok. One we spent looking around the weekend markets, getting lost in a maze of little shops selling everything you could imagine from turtles to WD40 and window shopping the Siam shopping centres topped off with a trip to the top of the Biyoke Sky???? With 360 degree views of the city from its tallest building. Pretty cool! The second day we saw China town and all its narrow streets filled with little stalls of shrimp and shark fins. It finished off our time in Bangkok well, but we are now more than ready to leave Asia, in search of BBQs, Kangaroos and a bit of fine Ozzy country.
G'day mate.
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