We’re entering the last few days of trip recap posts!! I hope you guys are enjoying reading these as much as I am writing them. I get a little nostalgic looking at the photos from my trip, hoping that someone will take me back. It doesn’t help much that I’ve been watching The Bachelorette every Monday night and the date nights have been in Thailand (Phuket and Chiang Mai… two places I also visited– oops, spoilers for the posts to come) and next week she’s going to Hong Kong? Sounds like my trip but in reverse!
The Bachelorette aside, we landed in Bangkok first and made our way to Ayutthaya. To get to Ayutthaya, we first had to go to the main Bangkok train terminal to buy tickets. Sadly, some of us were taking too long to order breakfast at McDonald’s (I swear it wasn’t me!) and we missed the first train out. We ended up sitting in the Bangkok train station for an extra hour and a half waiting for the next one.
It was quite interesting to sit around and “people watch” for the time we were there. Many families sat on the floor of the station, rather than on the plastic chairs that were available. At first I didn’t understand why they chose the floor over the chairs, but later I realized it was a lot easier to have a conversation when on the floor instead of sitting in rows of chairs that were all facing one direction. Never in North America would someone choose to sit on the floor of a public station instead of on a chair.
When it came time to board the train, I was super excited. We had paid for second class seats, which were almost 6 times the price of third class (general boarding) seats. To put this into perspective, our train tickets cost 245 Baht each (about $8 CAD), whereas the third class tickets cost 40 Baht. We decided on second class seats because of the fact that the train ride was close to 2 hours long and there were fans in the second class cars but not the third class. Not to mention, there was assigned seating for second class, whereas third class tickets were sold on the principle of “sell as many as you can”, which means that you were not guaranteed a seat and would have to wait for the next train if the current one was full.
I wish I had something exciting to say about the gorgeous views from the train as we traveled to Ayutthaya, but to be honest, I feel asleep and didn’t end up taking any photos. As soon as we got off the train, we went to find the ferry to take us to the island so we could start exploring.
We ended up renting bicycles from the restaurant that we ate lunch at. Talk about an all-in-one stop shop, eh? We paid 40 Baht (just under $1.50 CAD) to rent the bikes for the full afternoon!
I have so many photos of the temple ruins and Buddhas that we visited this afternoon, but I’ll just post a handful since I don’t want to bore you with all of them. The structures themselves were incredible! So much history behind the burnt bricks. We spent about 4 or 5 hours biking around the entire island to try to see as many ruins as we could. I think there were something like 17 landmarks to check out and we only made it to 4 of them.
I have to say that the scariest part of this day trip was biking around the streets of Ayutthaya. It was an adventure and a half trying to dodge cars and motorcycles! Not to mention that in some intersections, there were no lights and strange U-shaped curves in the road and we had no idea which way to yield to traffic.
Did I mention that it was 40°C with humidity in Thailand (104°F)? You can rest assured that I ended up with a nasty t-shirt tan after biking in the hot sun for hours this day. haha free souvenir!!
