Back when we first arrived in Thailand and started making plans on where to go and what to see (yes, that is the order we do things in) we established pretty quickly that at some point we would head to Chiang Mai, the largest city in the north of the country and the major hub for tourists visiting the region. During one of my stupidly early morning awakenings, as established in a prior blog, I’d taken the time to look into getting from Bangkok to Chiang Mai and found that there were 3 options. Flying, a 12-hour bus ride or a 15-hour train ride. Flying with Katy is, unless there really is no alternative, not an option, and after our experience with South America we were determined to avoid long-haul bus journeys wherever possible. That being said, much of Thailand is essentially a giant river delta so it’s largely pancake-flat and therefore has lots of nice long straight roads. Also, the driving here is considerably less manic (maybe because, like all civilized countries, they drive on the left), which all told makes for a damn sight more comfortable a prospect than being driven around winding mountain roads by lunatics with a death wish.
So that left trains, and whilst our journey to Kanchanaburi had been a pleasant experience, the thought of spending 15 hours in such conditions (assuming that the train runs on time… not that this is foreshadowing in any way…) was not a particularly appealing at all. Night trains are also an option, considerably more expensive than the day trains (not prohibitively, prices start around £20 each) but they came with a fully flat bed compartment and you can upgrade to a cabin with a double bed if you so desire.
Whilst researching all of this though, I was looking at other places to go in Thailand, places we could potentially use to break up the journey a bit. Thailand, in no small part due to its favourable geography, is a pretty populous country. With 69,000,000 people it is one place up from the UK on a list of countries by population (fine, I’ll close the Wikipedia tab) and so, unlike South America, you don’t get vast swathes of countryside with nothing in it for hours at a time. Fortunately for our ever-evolving seat-of-our-pants travel plans, the railway line from Bangkok to Chiang Mai is brimming with towns and cities, several of which offer great tourist sights to see and an opportunity to break up the journey. With 6 months still ahead of us in our travels we had time to spare so decided to make stops along the way in Ayutthaya and Sukhothai, both cities built around the ruins of former Thai capitals*.
*So far, dear reader, I’ve written 458 words and am only now getting to the part where I actually tell you about what we did. Before coming out to Asia my Dad gave us the advice that we should be briefer with our blogs, writing little and often. I genuinely tried to stick to that advice at first but after just two weeks old habits have crept back in. Ah well, I’ve gone 32 years not listening to my Dad’s advice, I was hardly going to start now.
After waking up at the crack of dawn, we checked out of our hostel and begrudgingly trudged our way up to Kanchanaburi Station for the 7:20 train back to Bangkok, having packed the night before so as to allow ourselves a precious extra few minutes in bed (our forward planning may not go that far forward but will always stretch far enough to account for Katy Boyce and sleep). We got back to Bangkok around 11:30 and took a taxi across the city to Hua Lamphong Station, the city’s main railway station and hub for trains to the north and east of the country. We killed some time in a coffee shop and acquired our tickets for the journey to Ayutthaya for the princely sum of 30THB (about 75p). That’s 75p for both of us! 75p. Yeah, I’m looking at you National Rail! Sure, the trains aren’t in great condition, they’re slow and the tracks are pretty bumpy, but hell, for 75p to travel 50 miles you could strap me to a wooden plank bolted on to a set of wheels and I’d still be happy.
Our train was quite a bit busier than the one from Kanchanaburi and we happened to end up in a carriage with several other farangs (Thai word equivalent to ‘gringo’) who got very unsettled when the section of the train we were on suddenly detached from the rest of the train and was briefly shunted on to a different platform before being put back on the same platform again. Soon enough though we departed (from the correct platform), working our way through the suburbs of northern Bangkok, stopping frequently at the numerous stations lining the route, and equally as frequently between stations for no apparent reason (So far, so National Rail). Pretty quickly the train began building up a delay, but that was OK, we had read that the trains usually departed on time but would often begin running late en-route and so we had left ourselves plenty of time for such eventualities. Arriving at your final destination at the scheduled time on a Thai train, it seems, happens about as frequently as there being a winner on Takeshis castle.
After a particularly lengthy stop at a station near the old airport, word came down that the train had broken down and that we needed to get off and wait for another one. This meant jumping down on to the neighbouring tracks and waiting at the platform opposite. We only knew of this because one of the Farangs on our train spoke enough Thai to get the gist of the announcement being made from the tannoy. Otherwise, who knows where we would have ended up!
During our time in Bangkok and Kanchanaburi, many of the Thais we had got chatting to had asked us about our travel plans. When we told them we were planning to get trains, without fail they would say ‘you know there’s a bus you can get?’ We’d tell them we knew that, but that we liked trains, plus they are generally quite a bit cheaper than the buses, so as arrogant know-it-all westerners we decided to stick to our plans. They were always too polite to push the issue, but there was always a subtle look of ‘well, it’s your funeral’ on their faces. I guess this was why; the trains breakdown, nobody tells you what’s happening, you’re required to jump on to active railway lines and the delays are so frequent and so large that each station has a dedicated screen just for telling you the delay times.
Still better value than National Rail.
Along came our replacement train (or rather, just the next train coming along that was heading to Ayutthaya) and we crammed ourselves on, arriving in Ayutthaya just over an hour and a half behind schedule where we were met by Mr Vann (who picked us up in his van, his joke, not mine), the owner of the hostel we would be staying at for the next two nights. After a short ride we arrived and Mr Vann sat us down in the attached coffee shop for a spirited, enthusiastic and somewhat lengthy guide to all of the historical sites in the city. After this he showed us to our room where he proceeded to show us how the shower works, where the sink is, where the light switches are, how the TV works, were the holster for the air condition controller is, how the door works, how the curtains work and so on and so on. Having been travelling all day, our typical British patience for and politeness towards a very nice man who is trying very hard to be helpful and hospitable was wearing a little thin, and the frequency of our ‘thank yous’ and ‘khop-khuns’, intonated with a ‘we’re fine, bugger off’ tone, was increasing exponentially but unsurprisingly being lost in translation. I don’t want to be unfair here, Mr Vann and his wife are absolutely lovely people and clearly very passionate about their business and their home city and he was, after all, kind enough to wait around at the train station for over an hour until we arrived.
We headed out for dinner and a well-deserved beer in a restaurant around the corner where we could watch the sun set over the ruins of a sizeable stupa before retiring for the night, intending to get up and out exploring temples before the sun overpowered us.
The following day we made an early start (by our standards) and got out of the door shortly before 9:30am. After a hearty breakfast of scrambled eggs on toast (yeah that weaning us off of western breakfasts thing is still coming along quite slowly) we headed over to the large temple complex in the heart of the city. Ayutthaya was founded in 1350 and was the capital of the Ayutthaya Kingdom (the second Siamese kingdom after Sukhothai) until it was sacked by the Burmese army at the end of the Siamese-Burmese war in 1767.
The ruins today are preserved largely as they were when the city fell, whilst work is done to ensure the ruins do not deteriorate further, no restoration work has been carried out and so the ruins strike a fascinating contrast to the modern wats, temples and palaces in Bangkok. Thai architecture has not changed dramatically from the Ayutthaya period to today, so even seeing the ruins without the roofs, plasterwork, fittings and decorations it wasn’t too hard trying to imagine what the place would have looked like in it’s hey-day. What’s left today are columns, stupas and raised platforms built from millions of thin red and brown bricks held together with thick layers of mortar. Around the towers of brickwork can be found many hundreds of Buddhas, near all of which have been decapitated or completely destroyed.
During the height of Ayutthaya’s power, it was home to almost a million people and its very open attitude to foreigners and trade had made it internationally renowned and incredibly wealthy. One of the many ways that the Kings stored their wealth was by having the cities’ gold melted down and placed inside the head of the Buddha statues around the temples and palaces in the city centre. When the Burmese sacked the city, they decapitated and destroyed the Buddha statues in order to retrieve the gold from them.
After spending a little while walking through the grounds of Wat Maha That, the largest single structure in the complex, we headed further into the temple complex along a long path between several small lakes, flanked sporadically with trees and small temple ruins and walls. Large bodies of water are often incorporated into the construction of temples and palaces as, according to Buddhist belief, water is a purifying substance, so surrounding holy sites with bodies of water helps to maintain their sanctity (Stagnant water and the associated swarms of mosquitos apparently are not a threat to said sanctity). At the far end of the path we crossed a small bridge and joined a pathway around another large temple ruin before succumbing to the intensity of the early afternoon sun and ducking under the awning of a small outbuilding.
After sweating and the replenishing a gallon of water each and with a little more cloud cover rolling in, we proceeded up to Wat Phra Si Samphet, a long, thin temple complex cantered on a trio of 3 massive stupas with their thick, grey plaster layer still largely intact. Around the central 3 stupas are numerous small stupas, temples, columns and statues, all of which have a notable lean towards the centre of the site. This isn’t intentional, but the soft soil has subsided over the years under the massive weight of the 3 central stupas and thus the surrounding structures have begun to lean in.
Despite the forecast of cloud and the possibility of rain, the sun was unrelenting so after Wat Phra Si Samphet we gave up on walking to any of the other sites, most of which were considerably further out and headed back to our nearby hostel to bask in the glory of air conditioning. After a few hours of cooling we headed out again to the nigh market a few streets down, unlike some of the night markets which are heavily touristy, the one in Ayutthaya is a bit more bare-bones and authentic. A single run of food stalls and clothes sellers occupies one side of the street whilst the traffic still runs as normal on the other side. We walked down and back up taking in the sights, smells, sounds and leisurely chaos of the market, Katy even plucked up the courage to try a tuna ball and a cheese ball from one of the venders; our first foray into genuine Thai street food.
We had dinner up the road at another restaurant which clearly wasn’t expecting any customers that evening and had to frantically jump in to action when we strolled in (It was, of course, delicious, and cheap, we’ve established there is a roughly inverse correlation between the cost of food and its quality here) and we set off back to our hostel bellies full and happy with our days exploring of Ayutthaya.
Off to Sukothai next.
Katy and Dave Avoid Adulthood 