Summary of today? It's hot in Thailand, really bloody hot. Today would have been a very good day to be an armchair traveler reading someone else's blog.
In other news, we rented bicycles for the day to see the city.
For some background, Ayutthaya was the capital of Siam from 1350 until 1767, when the Burmese sacked it. It was known to Europeans as "The Venice of the East" for it's beauty, but it is an apt comparison for other reasons too: location (where 3 rivers come together), trading power, political importance, and prosperity. It was even relatively defensible due to the rivers flooding each year driving off attempted sieges, though evidently this didn’t always work. Unfortunately, the Burmese didn't leave much behind.
We started by going to each museum looking to purchase the 220 Bhat combined ticket to most of the sights on the island, which Lonely Planet said was available at the museums and wats. The folks at the museums didn't know what we were talking about, and the descriptions of the museums in the guide didn't make them seem worth spending $3-$5 each to get into. Finally we made it to tourist information and got the skinny on the combined ticket: it is actually only for five 50 Bhat wats, and we decided to get it anyway.
Once we got into the first wat, Wat Phra Si Sanphet, we discovered that it was crazy hot even in the shade and kind of hard to enjoy anything. Plus, basically everything worth seeing we'd been able to see from the outside.
After, we wandered into Wihaan Mongkhon Bophit next door, which houses an enormous (17m) bronze Buddha. It was impressive. While not exiting, this building was in good shape due to a recent gift from the Burma prime minister to restore it.
We gathered enough energy to move on with the help of a gross snow cone-like-thing to lower the temperature of our brains. On a day like this, higher brain function is restored by attempting to give yourself an ice cream headache. Wat Phra Ram was impressive, but it looked like we could see everything from the outside so we stayed on our bikes rather than go inside.
Next we turned into a pretty park that would have had great cycling, were it not for the occasional step in the path.
When we left the park, we found ourselves at Wat Phra Mahathat. The main attraction here was the Buddha head lodged in a bunch of tree roots. Now that was genuinely cool (well, neat anyway). And you had to go in to see it.
There were no shortage of headless Buddhas that the head could have come from, at this and all the other wats in the city.
Next door we went into Wat Ratburana, which also has a crypt. We climbed up into the stupa and enjoyed a divine breeze (and a nice view), before descending into the bowels of the temple to see what was left of the old stucco paintings (not much) and a few other articles (most have been removed to museums). There was a small amount of awesome carving work left on this stupa. After resting in the divine breeze again (you really learn to appreciate life's little pleasures on a trip like this), we returned to our hotel for a 2-3pm siesta and cold shower in the AC. Very nice.
After we were cooled down, we biked down to the open-air restaurant where we ate dinner last night for a late lunch. That one was closed, so we went next door, and had another excellent meal.
After lunch we did the south half of the ring road around the island, stopping at Wat Suwan Dararam, a strange modern wat with murals all over the inside showing various royals doing various historical things. Never seen anything like it before.
Following the ring road some more, we saw many interesting things. A pretty waterfront park. Houses on stilts. A nice shady bike path on the other side of a canal. Once we got to a place we could cross the canal, the bike path ended in a park with minor ruins. We poked around looking for the bike path and instead found a rickety little bridge across the canal and into a quaint little neighborhood. At least as quaint of a neighborhood as you could imagine when corrugated steal is one of the main building materials.
This road shortly dumped us back out on the main road and we continued on our way until we got to the bridge and doubled back to the final wat we'd paid admission for already, Wat Chai Wattanaram. It was, as promised, the best preserved, and looked basically like a little miniature Angkor Wat overlooking the river. We enjoyed the view over the river from the shrine high in the stupa on that side.
After, we took the north route of the ring road back to our hotel, taking an interesting-looking side road on the way which led us past a wonderful row of little stupas and dropped us at a big event being held in front of one of the less important wats.
At first we though it was a local protest associated with the big one going on today in Bangkok, but upon closer inspection, it turned out to be a martial arts festival, and a big presentation was just starting. We watched guys in fancy clothes file in, part of a sward-making presentation outside, then some Thai dancers.
It got kind of boring at that point and we wandered to another area where elephants were doing some show fighting (for whose benefit we couldn't quite see). Unfortunately, they were just finishing up as we arrived.
Since it was getting dark, we hurried on home at this point. If I was going to do this day over, I'd skip paying for entry except for the wat with the head and the wat with the crypt, and just bike around seeing everything from the outside, something we were pressed for time to accomplish.
For dinner we went up to the Night Market and along the way stopped in at what appeared to be a Chinese fair with snacks, games, and performance dancing. The Night Market, when we finally got there around 8:30 seemed to already be starting to close down for the night. They aren't night owls around here.
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