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Published: October 5th 2006
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Map
A map of the palace. Looks bigger in person. Fruits trees everywhere! My kind of palace. Warning: This one is super depressing.
The trip to Ban-Pa-In Palace in Ayutthaya was a class field trip, the 2nd out of 4. The first was of the grand palace in Bangkok. I didn't go on that one because I was still in Malaysia at the time but I have a feeling I didn't miss out on much. After so many temples and palaces, the scenery starts to repeat itself and it feels like your brain is going to throw up if you see one more.
Ayutthaya is fairly close to Bangkok, about an hour away. According to our tour guide, Henry, Ayutthaya would have been one of the great wonders of the world if it existed till this day. At the peak, the city was covered in gold from India. Supposedly, the riches came from trade with Europe and China. They would buy goods from Europe and sell them to China. Very clever indeed.
The first tour was of King Rama the 5th's summer palace. In the Ayutthaya period the King traveled extensively through out Europe to create alliances in the attempt to avoid colonization. The tour consisted of the King's main residence which was European influenced,
The Mighty Mango Tree
This is what the Mighty Mango Tree looks like. temples, some humongous dollhouses for tea in addition to sleeping quarters for visiting Kings and Queens from Russia, Germany, Switzerland, England, etc. There was also a Chinese influenced palace. The Chinese community at the time put their money together to build a temple to honor their king. Supposedly it was his favorite residence. The Chinese palace also has the craziest scenery carved out of camel bone. Do you realize how much soup they had to make to get that much bone? Unfortunately we were not allowed to take pictures inside the buildings. So no pics of that.
An interesting factoid about King Rama V: He had 5 queens, 400 wives and 97 children. Busy busy busy guy.
Afterwards we went to another wat (Thai/lLao for Buddhist temple). Same-O-same-o. Blah (I hate wats! I hope I don’t go to prison for saying that). We did this stick thing where you shake the canister until a stick falls out. Each of the sticks has a number which corresponds with a fortune. My fortune sucks. I'm suppose to have bad circumstances or something. But compared to others, my message didn't seem quite so bleak.
We had lunch at a five
Baby Mango
The best find of the day. My first Mango tree and my first mango still on the tree mango. star hotel. It was buffet. Yea, I know, I went kinda crazy. I've never been to a buffet where ALL of the food was good before or at least decent.
The best part of the Ayutthaya trip happened after lunch. We went to the elephant park for a ride. Because the elephants no longer have homes to live in or a place to find food, they still have to make a living so this elephant park sort of employs them (made sense when I read the brochure-convincing brochure). The elephants and the handlers were dressed in royal war attire. I'm glad that I finally rode an elephant but I have to admit, the ride was bumpier than I imagined. Also, elephants are much bigger when you're sitting on them. But I was thinking: if I had a craving for fruit and it was in a really tall tree, "Who needs a ladder when you have an elephant?"
Right after the ride we headed to another wat. "Oh for the love of god, not another wat!" This wat had a market, so instead of giving myself the enjoyment of looking at another pile of rocks as walls and more
Moa-nal or Can-oat?
Moats and canals everywhere throughout the palace. The floating market is supposedly inspired by the canals around the palace. stupas I deprived myself of the pleasure and went to the market to look at fruits, dried fish and machetes.
When I thought there was no more room for anything sucky to happen: On the bus ride home after a long day of wat-hopping, we ran over a nail and had to pull over to the side of the road. They spent about 3 hours trying to patch up the tire before they finally gave up and pulled out the spare (they had a spare?!?). At this point it was 8 in the evening and lunch was about 9 hours ago. I wasn't sure if I should be happy that we had a spare or pissed they just figured out that they should use it. I guess the bus driver and the tour guide thought that it would be faster to fix the tire than pull out the spare because the bus was new and the tire is bolted under the floor in addition to planks of plastic (pulling out the spare tire took 5 minutes-doh!). Oh la vash!!
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Jonathan
non-member comment
'wat' happened?
hola, your pictures sure are a nice way for me to procrastinate....hey, do those cars only have 3 wheels?