Jumping ship. I mean train.

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I didn’t bother writing a blog yesterday. Not through laziness but due to the fact there was nothing worth scripting. I basically woke up and spent the whole day walking around Ubon photographing temples. I did enquire about a flight home but 26,465 baht sounded a bit pricey. I found my own flight several hours later online saving myself a pathetic 1000 baht, the main puller being the fact it was an overnight flight bypassing the horrid London airports and touching down in Manchester at a very respectable 7.10am, on a Sunday. Nobody is gonna mind picking me up on a weekend morning, those exclusive rights given to my best friend Dee. Marvelous.

I’d tried my hardest yesterday to try and find some transport to the border of Cambodia so I could pop over and visit Angkor Wat, as previously blogged. But this is not the right time of year to find such a deal and so I scrapped the idea completely at the last minute. My new plan was to simply catch the train all the way to Bangkok. The trek itself is an unimpressive (though much regarded passage) eleven hour affair to which I wasn’t very optimistic about but the thought of more coaches was taking its toll.

While on the train it dawned on me I still had nine days left before my flight home. That thought was drowned by the thought that I’d already spent a full week in Bangkok only two months ago, and that it seemed ridiculous to bum around there for a further nine days. After all, the shopping spree is only gonna take a day. I pulled out my Lonely Planet and surveyed my train route. There is one fairly big city about an hours’ drive north of Bangkok which my train was passing through. That place: Ayuthaya. I’d read up on this place when travelling north to Chiang Mai all those many weeks ago and almost stopped off then. I remember it sounded a truly authentic cultural cauldron of Thai history and decadence. My mind was made up, I’d stay there for two or three nights and check out the brew. So much for planning but this idea made much more sense.

I’m so glad to be back in Thailand, land of random train changing and other such shenanigans. Absolutely marvelous.

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