Exploring Ayuthaya...

Ayuthaya is a historical town located 80 km from Bangkok and is very well known for ancient buddhist temples. We were hoping that we would get a chance to visit the place inspite of pretty busy schedule at work. Finally, today we didn't have much to do and so all of us (myself, Faisal, Lisa and Harvey) decided to take the one day Ayuthaya tour. The plan was to reach the place by road, see all the sites and take a boat ride back to Bangkok. Our tour guide was a pretty enthusiastic guy who gave a pretty detailed description of the past history of thailand and went to great lengths to describe how evil the burmese army was when they invaded thailand. The city apprently was the capital of thailand and has a long history dating back to the 13th century.



We reached Ayuthaya by bus in a little over one hour and our first stop was a buddhist temple (of course!!). The temple had a huge renovated buddha statue. Unlike the 'Reclining Buddha' in Bangkok, its buddha in a traditional meditating posture here..We walked around the temple ruins for a while and were ready to go to the next site. The real attraction of the place is another temple complex which is a UNESCO world heritage site with literally dozens of buddha images lined up..There were also two huge buddha statues on both sides of the entrance of the main temple. Since the statues were not renovated, it gave a more authentic look than the other buddha statues that we had seen so far. It almost seems like its Buddha everywhere in this place..Every direction you turn there is one more Buddha statue..Compare this with indian temples filled with statues of every imaginable creatures, gods, goddesses, demons etc...We spent well over an hour in the site and finally got back to join the group.





Our next stop was the King's palace which is the official residence of the king of thailand. Since the place is pretty big, they give out golf carts on rent for people who are lazy to walk..Since we fell under the category of people who were lazy to walk, we hired a cart and since Harvey had quite a lot of experience with them, he readily agreed to take the responsibility of driving us around. They gave us a map of the whole place which had numerous small places of interest marked on it. We followed the other carts and pretty much stopped wherever they stopped. After hanging out for a few minutes and the inevitable round of taking pictures, we moved on..Personally, I wasn't really impressed with the palace. Actually, the fact of the matter is that I am not a big fan of royal palaces. I am neither interested nor curious to know where a king eats or what kind of plates or spoons he uses. So I gave a very cursory look at some of the rooms and walked out. Much of the palace area had small european style statues on every corner of the roads. One of the notable things in the palace is the floating building in the middle of a small artificial pond. There is also a chinese hall that is popular among the tourists who visit the place. The building is bright red in colour and had a lot of signs posted inside preventing any tourist from taking pictures.









Our return back to bangkok was on a boat (i am not sure if it should be called a ferry or a boat) and it was quite enjoyable..The trip takes about 3 hrs and you would get to see countless temples pass by on both sides of the river. Most of the temples have similar layout and architecture and once you see a few of them, I guess you've seem them all. We also got to enjoy the buffet lunch on board the ferry on our way back to Bangkok.