Finding out what's wat in Ayuthaya and Sukothai

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As you can tell from the title, whilst in Ayuthaya and Sukothai we enjoyed many wat/what puns! A wat is a temple (eg. Angkor Wat) and Ayuthaya and Sukothai are full of them!

The main part of Ayuthaya is a small island, which we hired bicycles to cycle around. The majority of the wats here are ruins, and many of them destroyed by the Burmese back when Ayuthaya was the capital. Most interesting was this head from a Buddha statue, which was left behind when the Burmese pillaged the wats and since then a tree has grown around it to lift it up. Remarkably it sits almost perfectly straight and is definitely incredible! If you search Ayuthaya (also spelt Ayutthaya) in google images you will see it. It was so hot and humid that we felt we needed a sugary boost and stopped of at stalls selling Roti Sai Mai. This is warm pancakes served with strands of sugar cane. It was delicious but sickly after a few of them! In the evening we took a boat around the island, which stopped off at the wats on the other side of the river. Here we saw a gigantic Buddha being wrapped in orange/gold robes. There was a whole team of people folding up the required material, there was a lot of it! We watched the sunset over a particularly large, and not too destroyed, wat. Here we took some great pictures and it was a great end to the day.

Sukothai was our next stop, its 6 hours north of Ayuthaya by bus and is in the southern part of northern Thailand. Although its much older than Ayuthaya it was far more intact as it was never destroyed. We hired a bicycle again and saw some incredible temples with some large stone Buddha statues which had some remaining gold leaf on their fingers (this was pretty refreshing after seeing so many, sometimes gaudy, golden Buddhas). After that we sought out this highly recommended noodle restaurant for the regional speciality of different types of pork in a white noodle soup with chilli and green beans. The guys running it were very funny (after asking where we were from one guy told us he liked manchester united and kept saying "Liverpool go bye bye" to another guy in a Liverpool shirt) and the food was great! We stayed in a really nice bungalow and the place baked its own bread, which was great for breakfast.

From here we headed off to Chiang Mai. This was the most relaxed we've been so far having not booked a bus or a guesthouse. It worked out fine though and we are now in Chiang Mai, enjoyed the Northern architecture and looking forward to interacting with elephants!

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