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Published: August 22nd 2008
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Just the Three of Us
Us and Buddha in Sukhothai The last few days have seen us power up Thailand's central tourist corridor against the southward flow of Thailand's former capitals. Together with our friends Sarah and Bob, we have visited Ayutthaya and Sukothai, both of which are impressive remnants of ancient Siam.
As Ko Pha Ngan was filling with (mostly male) tourists for the notorious Full Moon party, we escaped on the sunset ferry and watched the sky glow orange and pink over the Bay of Thailand as we munched squid-flavored potato chips. We spent the night in a beautiful hotel in the not-so-beautiful port city of Surat Thani. Arriving late, the four of us took seats in the hotel's deserted restaurant, received menus, and watched in amusement as our waitress phoned for takeout to match our orders. The next morning, we hopped our flight to Bangkok and - after some ragged bargaining in front of some amused Bangkok locals - hired a taxi for the one hour trip to Ayutthaya. After finding a hotel (our worst so far: it bizarrely provided us with large(ish) scratchy towels instead of top sheets) and some food, we struck out on foot in the late afternoon to explore the city.
Ayutthaya
Sunset in Ayutthaya
Shadows of the four of us at Wat Chai Wattanaram was Siam's capital in its heyday, and until it was sacked by the Burmese in the late 1700's, it was a massive metropolis. It is set on an island surrounded by a large moat, and its ancient wats and municipal architecture are scattered throughout the dusty, noisy, but not unpleasant modern city. The large clusterings of separate ruins have no single tickets nor any easy means to explore the historical sites, meaning that the best approach is to travel between sites by foot or tuk tuk and pay admission fees at sites that seem interesting. At our first stop, we visited two side-by side temple complexes and marveled at their hundreds of Buddha statues - each decapitated by either the invading Burmese, or by latter-day looters driven by the price they continue to fetch on the illicit antiquities market.
The sites of the city are spread out enough, and the tourist traffic light enough, that we had most of the places we visited to ourselves. The temples complexes were beautiful, and some remain very intact. The towers, called "prang," are extremely tall and we climbed up, over, and inside many of them.
On a recommendation from our guide
book, we then hired a tuk tuk to take us to 17th century Wat Chai Wattanamaran for a sunset visit, and the four of us were astounded by how beautiful the ruins were. The fading light of the setting sun made the bricks glow red and orange, creating impressive photo-taking opportunities. It was one of the most beautiful sights - and sites - we have seen so far on this trip. We finished off the night with a twilight walk around the dramatically floodlit ruins in the city center, a tight Scrabble competition, and a healthy amount of the local beer. We then curled up under our provided bed-sheet towels and went to sleep.
The next morning, after delicious thick chocolate banana pancakes, the four of us headed to the enormous Buddha statue housed in the relatively modern Wihann Mongkhan Bophit, then enjoyed the neighboring ruins of Wat Phra Si Samphet before parting ways. With Sarah and Bob taking an alternate route to our next stop, we took a relaxing bus ride north to Sukhothai. Five hours later, after unloading into our private bungalow, we walked into the modern part of town between boisterous groups of semi-wild dogs.
Sukhothai may have lost some of its glitter when it lost its role as Siam's capital to Ayutthaya in the 14th century, but it still has it going on. Case in point: free nightly jazzercize in the public park. We watched from a respectable distance as many locals grooved and sweated to techno. The disinterested instructor, despite his microphone, was almost drowned out by the screaming flocks of birds in the surrounding trees. We spent the next couple of hours snacking at the street stalls in the night market before filling up completely with curry at a gloriously Tintin-themed restaurant nearby, and then negotiated our way carefully between the sleeping packs of dogs to the guesthouse, Olympics coverage, and bed.
We made our way immediately to Sukhothai's old city the next morning, crowding onto a public tuk-tuk for the half-hour ride. Sukhothai is where Thailand became Thailand - or rather, Siam, Siam. Two thousand years ago it beat back the Khmer Empire - governed by distant Angkor - and went its own way. What's left of the old city is strewn over a very large area, and can really only be seen by bicycle. The site is divided into three separate areas, central, north, and west Sukothai, so we spent the first half of our day exploring the tightly compacted central area and then biked further afield to check out impressive ruins in the north and west areas.
As in Ayutthaya, Buddha is prominent absolutely everywhere in the ruins - standing, sitting, covered in gold-leaf, dressed in silk. But here, many of Sukhothai's sculptures are still intact, or have been carefully restored, and the moats and lawns in the central site are painstakingly manicured. But a half-hour bike ride to the west brought us to a scattering of wats in thick forest, the most interesting of which featured a forty-foot tall standing Buddha, perched high on a grassy hill. The site's best section, however, was the northern sector, which contained our favorite of Sukhothai's ruins: Wat Si Cham. A seated Buddha, massive but graceful, dominates the structure, and we had the whole complex to ourselves.
By chance, we reunited with Sarah and Bob at the rental shop when we returned our bikes, and compared notes on the site over cards and dinner in town. We finished the evening at a street stall with our favorite newly-discovered Southeast Asian dessert - sweet roti, a thin, flaky nan-like bread cooked to order on a hotplate and then slathered with condensed milk, chocolate, and bananas.
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