Ayutthaya, the land of lost ruins

Ayutthaya, at it's peak was the capital city of the Thai kingdom. According to my guidebook, Ayutthaya was so well endowed with temples that sunlight reflecting off their gilt decoration was said to dazzle from 3 miles away. Ayutthaya was founded in 1851 by a man who became a king. In it's heyday, it was an amphibious city with it's 1 million population using canals as transportation. These people were also living in houseboats. To gauge it's success, at this time it had double the population of London. It even had 40 different nationalities living here at one point. Unfortunately, as every good city has to fall, so did this one. In 1767 after 400 years of stability and prosperity, neighboring country, Burma attacked and destroyed the city. All the citizens had to retreat into the jungles as Burma was taking tens of thousands of prisoners back. It's now a popular spot today to go visit because you can see the remains of all the temples that had been destroyed. The architecture of the remains are from the Khmer era, resembling many of the temples I had seen at Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

Ayutthaya is located 80km north of Bangkok; our trip there was very adventurous. In Thailand, you can take either 1st, 2nd or 3rd class trains. 1st is the best - you get a cushioned seat and air conditioning. 2nd class gives you a cushion and sometimes air conditioning, sometimes a fan. 3rd class has wooden seats and no air conditioning, but just open windows and sometimes a fan attached to the ceiling. We took 3rd class. It cost us less than 50 cents a piece. It actually wasn't so bad and I enjoyed the wind blowing on me while we made our way North. I wouldn't want to do a 10 hour trip like this, no way; but for the 3 hours or so it took - it was fun.

Our guesthouse was a cute home set back in a garden. It's meant to give you the "real Thai experience." It certainly did - the roosters that live in the garden woke me up both mornings. Moreover, the barking dogs kept me up all through the night. Roosters are the norm in Thailand - they are everywhere. I think from now on, whenever I hear a rooster, I will be brought back to Thailand. Street dogs are everywhere as well. They run the place. Some cities have homeless people, but Thai cities have an abundance of homeless dogs. We just nicknamed them all "scurvy dogs".

After checking into our guesthouse, we went for a walk about town. We were trying to find the tourism office, but stumbled upon the ruins. Change of plans - time to check out some cool World Heritage Sites!

The first one we went to was called Wat (wat means temple) Ratburana. It was built in 1424 by the King at that time.

At this temple, you could walk up a flight of stairs and then go down inside following a bunch of really steep stairs to enter a crypt. At one point, there were several hundred Buddha images, but robbers have come to steal them away.

The second one we went to was called Wat Phra Mahathat. This temple was made to enshrine the remains of Buddha himself. The king between the years of 1388-95 claims that he was looking out his window one morning when ashes of the Buddha materialized out of thin air here. A gold casket containing these ashes also was placed here.

This temple is also famous for this Buddha head that has been overgrown by the roots of a tree.

In the evening, we found a great restaurant that had live music and dancing. We had a pleasant dinner with some Thai musical guests in the front. Since today was actual election day, we ran into the problem of not being able to drink again. Luckily for us, our guest house owner was unaware of this or didn't care - she sold us beer. We played cards over several beers - finally enjoying my first beer in Thailand.

Click here for pictures of this day