Ayuthaya - City of Ruins

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Ayuthaya is great! I'm sitting in an inernet cafe waiting for a night train to Chaing Mai that leaves at 23:30. We've had a great couple of days here and have been staying in a hostle that is in an old teak wood house (Tony's Place). Ayuthaya, whoes names is dirived for the Sanskrit 'Ayodhya' which is the mythical Capital city of Lord Ram, is filled with amazing ruined temples, many of which were destroyed by Burmese invaders. This place used to be the capital city and the emerald buddha which is now in Bangkok used to be here so it's packed with history.

Dispite being a major tourist place it's not actually very touristy at all. I think most people just come on coach trips from Bangkok and not many people stay. It's a lovley break after Bangkok and now it feels like we are really in Thailand. Ayuthaya is a pretty small town on an island in the middle of two rivers. It's a very low key kind of place which makes it nice to walk round and just explore.

We arrived from Bangkok yesterday with a lovley Italian guy we met on the bus on the way to the station. It was tipping it down but we went to explore anyway. It is actually very atmospheric in the rain. Everywhere you go here there are ruins of Buddhist temples and you can see them all round the skyline. It was very exciting when we first went exploring. A lot of the bigger temples are in the guide book but loads of small ones arn't even mentioned and they are all open to wonder round. We found walking round really good as we found loads of things we didn't know where here. We did go to one of the bigger temples yesteray which has an amazing stone Buddha head that some time ago fell at the base of a tree and the tree roots have just grown round it.

Today we walked to several more Wats (temples). They do all merge into one after a while but they were all very enjoyable. Several have been restored and have huge gold Buddhas. We saw one of the biggest Buddha images in Thialand which was pretty aueinspiring. We aslso found a stupa (bell shaped tower thing) with a tree the had just grown stright on top of it.

We have been trying to learn Thai too. Sam is rather better than me at languages and has mastered hello and thank you. It's rather hard because it's a tonal language and you have to get the internation right. But once you get started it's not as hard as it sounds i think.

Anyway this cafe is closeing now so i'll say more another time. All in all Ayuthaya is a great place and I would recomend it. I've really enjoyed myself.

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