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Ayutthaya
It was a nice lesiurely start in Kanchanaburi where I enjoyed pineapple pancakes for breakfast! We met our new guide who would be replacing Noi, his name is Bet, he seems nice but quite nervous taking over from Noi, as he had lots of experience and Bet has only been working for Intrepid for 5 months! Today we had to get on two buses to get to Ayutthaya, neither air conditioned and each journey taking about 2 hours each! Luckily they had some super hi tech fans in the ceiling!!! and the windows opened so I did not really notice the heat! We are only in Ayutthaya for today as we are catching the overnight train to Chang Mai tonight!
A guesthouse provided us with 2 day rooms to use, we had lunch ( I abandoned the Thai style food for a Jacket Spud with bake beans and cheese - which I regretted as it was so bland ) and then went out in the Songthaews to visit three temples! The first temple Wat Mahathat was very different to what we have seen so far, it was a ruin so was quite cool to explore and had lots of stone buddhas with their heads missing etc... as pictured above there was also a cool stone Buddha head that the roots had grown around!! Was pretty freaky! Apparently the Burmese people had destroyed this temple! (Bloody Burmese people seem to keep getting mentioned for doing horrid things )
The next temple Wihan Phramongkhon Bophit ( I think) was more "disneyafied" like Bangkok with sparkly stuff everywhere and gift shops outside (very holy) although there was a cool fat Buddha which I liked tremendously!! There was also a river outside with a massive amount of Cat Fish in it! You could buy food and feed them, when you threw food in they went mental and jumped out of the water landing all over each other!! It reminded me of the "Cape Cross Seal Colony of Death" I saw in Namibia although not quite so gruesome or eternally disturbing!
There was an Elephant outside the third temple being exploited, which I completely disagree with but paid 20 baht to feed him a bunch of bananas just in case he was hungry! He did not have any chains on his feet which I was glad about though!.... I cannot remember what the name of the temple was but it was again more like ruins but had lots of stone Buddhas all in lines which made for a good photo!
It was an enjoybale few hours strolling around the different temples after which we made our way back to the Guesthouse to shower and sort ourselves out for the 13 hour overnight train journey to Chang Mai! -- should be an experience!
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