A Fleeting Stopover in Ayutthaya

---

After breakfast at Pong Phen guesthouse we sadly left and headed to the bus station.

Our journey to our next destination wasn't going to be straight forward. We caught the 9:30am rickety old bus out of Kanchanaburi, a 2 hour ride costing 50B each which took us half way to Suphanburi. We then had to get a connecting minivan at Suphanburi to take us the rest of the way, 80B each, which had air con and was more comfortable. We were pleased with the upgrade!!

It was 2:30pm by the time we got to Ayutthaya. We found our accomodation "Tony's Place" easily, just a stones throw from where we got dropped off. It was late in the day once we booked in, so we knew we were pushed for time to go into the historical park. Instead we booked a boat tour on the river at 4pm which took in some of the popular sights along the rivers edge.

There were about 12 of us on our boat tour. We piled in the long tail boat to see the sights along the river. We love the different modes of transport in Thailand and the slight variations of the tuk tuk in the different towns, however it is becoming increasingly obvious that the transport here doesn't really cater for the taller visitors to the country. In this particular case getting in and out of the long tail boat was quite a challenge.

We stopped off at three sights along the way, firstly the 'Wat Phanan Choeng' which wasnt overly exciting. Secondly we stopped off at the 'Wat Phutthai Sawsn' which had some nice ruins but it was our last stop at 'Wat Chaiwatthanaram' that really had the wow factor for us. The timing was key and as we arrived, the sun was setting and the sky was a nice pinky red in the background. It was definitely a great sight. We got some fantastic photos of these ruins at sunset.

We went back to "Tony's Place" absolutely buzzing, and had dinner in the restaurant with an Ozzie guy that we met on our river tour. We had a long 6 hour journey ahead of us the next day so called it a night round 10pm.

The following morning we planned to hire some bikes and see the other ruins inside the historical park before we left, however once we had had breakfast we decided we would be too rushed to enjoy it. We were catching the bus at 11am and knew we would be spending a full day at Sukhothai's Historical Park anyway. We had heard that the ruins at Sukhothai were more impressive.

---