Exploring temple ruins
Trip Start
Jan 29, 2008
1
7
32
Trip End
Mar 04, 2008
Ayutthaya, Thailand
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Wat Yai Chaya Mongkol
. We got to the first area we wanted to try because the LP made it sound pretty good. It was a nice area with fun-looking restaurants and lots of Internet cafes and laundry services nearby, but all the rooms were taken. We passed another hotel that looked really nice but I remembered reading in the guidebook that they had received a lot of complaints from past readers so we decided to try somewhere else. Where we ended up was very far from the flashy tourist area we had first tried. Or so it seemed with our backpacks on, in the dark and lost. Tonight we discovered it really wasn't that far at all. But in the end our seemingly out of the way rooms were in a decent place with good rates and still in the city centre so what more can you ask for?
This morning we had breakfast at the hotel and then booked another night. We took a tuk tuk to drop off our laundry and then each got hour long Thai massages. That was pretty awesome except for my elephant-squished leg is an absolute mess, all the way from ankle to hammies, so it was a bit painful getting that leg worked over. It brought out the bruising pretty good too so now I am trying to hide my legs for a few days, which might be difficult if we head to the beach next (our current plan). But the massage place was fantastic and they had delicious smelling body lotion that I bought since I couldn't bring mine on the plane from Canada with me. (I didn't want to check my luggage and I already had a full 1 litre bag of carry on liquids. Are these the stupidest regulations or is it just me?)
After we got our chores taken care of, we had our tuk tuk driver take us around the ruins here
The highest blessings
. Ayutthaya is the former Thai capital, from 1350 to 1767 when it was conquered by the Burmese. All that remains now are beautiful temple and palace ruins with lots of headless Buddhas. Our driver showed us some postcards so we could pick what we wanted to see and we picked six different locations. He was a very sweet guy and charged 200B/hr which, according to our Lonely Planet, is the going rate. It took us four hours in total to visit our 6 picks, and was very hot. I got our driver a water early on when I was buying myself some, and then later we were buying slushees and Robert called him over to help us translate. His English wasn't great but the slushee guy couldn't even tell us what flavours he was selling. I guess our driver thought we were calling him over to get his own slushee because he ordered one and I ended up paying for it. For 10B (30 cents) it was a cheap way to make me look good though.
We did a little shopping at the various markets around the ruins too. One very friendly Thai with good English started talking with us and asked Robert what he was doing with two girls. Robert convinced him he had two wives and I was for sale. The vendor figured Robert must be very rich to afford two women and a month long trip to Thailand with them.
I really enjoyed all of the ruins but by the end of the day even I wasn't snapping many photos. Too much of a good thing, perhaps.
After sweating it out at the ruins, we came back to the hotel to hose down and cool off, then walked to the laundry place to pick our clothes up
These are also the highest blessings
. The laundry girl somehow got all my clothes into this tiny little bag, all neatly folded and ironed, with room to spare.We then walked to the main drag, where we were trying to get a hotel last night, for dinner and had excellent Thai food at Tony's Place. Tony's Place is a large two-storey restaurant but it's all outdoors. This seems to be the thing in Thailand. There is rarely a real interior to anything. It basically looks like a really big two-tier patio. I now wish I had taken a photo.
Right next to the restaurant was a Thai massage place, so we stopped in and I got a 1.5 hour foot massage before heading back to our hotel for a little more planning and a lot of resting.
