Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Finally managed to get to go to Ayutthaya. Ended up with 5 of us going - Mark, Andrea, Dave and Tony. The journey there was pretty easy, we got a taxi to the North Terminal - saw the desk for Ayutthaya. Got there and was told that we needed to hurry as there was a bus about to leave. The bus was only 50bhat which was great!
Spent about an hour and a half on the bus. Once we got there, we figured out that we had gone a little too far in the town, so took a tuk-tuk to the tourist information place. We picked up some maps and decided to go for some lunch. We found some restaurants marked on the map, so looked for them. After about half an hour of walking and looking for these places we gave up as we just couldn't figure out where we were! We went back to where we started from and went in the opposite direction - which we soon discovered was the right way! oops. We saw lots of elephants giving people rides, then eventually found somewhere to sit down and have some food. I paid 40bhat for prawn fried rice (under a pound) and it was really good.
We finally set off to find some sites - Andrea really wanted to find the Buddha in the tree, so we tried to find that. We saw one of the temples/places which was pretty amazing. We then spent the next two hours trying to find the one temple with the Buddha in the tree - we even asked local people who were sat around - they all sent us off in different directions! We were on the verge of giving up, but spotted another temple in the background. We thought we'd give it one last go and see if anyone there knew where the Buddha was - much to our happiness, we finally found the right place! Took some pictures and decided that we had quite enough of temples, so back to the hustle and bustle of Bangkok. Didn't really want to go back cause it was so relaxing not to be hassled by everyone!
Went to Pat Pong market that evening - and it was shall we say interesting. Saw a lot of things that I would quite happy not to see again!
On the whole I enjoyed Bangkok but found that as tourists we were just seen as cash cows. People took it for granted that we were going to pay the stupid prices that they quoted. My biggest annoyance was with taxi drivers and tuk-tuk drivers - they always quote about 3 times the prices that things should be which is just ridiculous. I did prefer Ayutthaya, simply for its calmness and the beauty of the buildings.
- comments