Ayutthayeah!

I think my body forgave me for my few days of excess because I woke up on the morning of the 2nd bright and early and raring to head off to Ayutthaya. First off though, we had to get in touch with Claudia, an old friend of both Samantha and myself, who was arriving in Bangkok to being a 4 month study period ina town south of Bangkok (the name escapes me now). Claudia was flying in from Holland with basically no idea of where she was going or when she was getting there and our planning for her arrival was just about as well planned. We had booked a room for Claudia but had no idea when she was arriving and had no means of getting in touch as our mobiles didn't work and hers would obviously be off because she was flying. We had told reception that somebody may or may not be coming to take a room at some point during the day and our plan was to wait atthe hotel until about 10am at the latest and if there was no news, leave a sorry note at reception and head off. Besides, we couldn't lose out last day in Thailand waiting for somebody who might not even make it, right? That was how I was justifying leaving our friend alone in a Bangkok hotel anyway. Luckily, it didn't come to that and while we were getting ready to head down for breakfast, our room phone rang with Claudia on the other end so we grabbed some food while she got ready and headed off for a little adventure.

Getting there

There are several ways to get to Ayutthaya from your typical Bangkok hotel/guest house. Most hotels offer a car service that will drive you there and back. One shifty looking gent offered to drive us to Ayutthaya and wait for the day before driving us back to the tune of 2000 baht. We laughed and headed off because I knew we could get there for a fraction of that price (even though a driver for a day for 50 euros is hardly unreasonable...). We chose to travel by bus from Bangkok North/Northeastern bus station in the north of Bangkok and it set us back only 35baht each. The buses run from early morning through to around 7pm and are clean, air conditioned and fairly pleasant. Our bus even had a TV which was showing showing some strange show where a giant lizard fought with a huge millipede. It was brutal to say the least. Alternatively you can travel by train for even less (15 baht...thats right 25pence for a 2 hour train journey...) which turned out to be how we decied to come back. That is a story in itself, though. There are also boat tours that can take you up there but they were well out of our budget. I seem to remember prices being around the 6000 baht area for a full day cruise and tour guide etc but that sounded not only excessively expensive but also a bit dusty and boring.

A bit about Ayutthaya

Most people we mentioned this part of our trip to pretty much all responded the same way: "Where?". Well, I am no historian but I figured I would write a little about why we would jump on a bus for 2 hours to some place nobody seems to have heard of instead of spending more time in the wonderful Bangkok. So here goes, Joe's history of Ayutthaya:

The kingdom of Ayutthaya (Thai: ??????) was a Thai kingdom that existed from 1350 to 1767. King Ramathibodi I (Uthong) founded Ayutthaya as the capital of his kingdom in 1350 and absorbed Sukhothai, 640 km to the north, in 1376. Over the next four centuries the kingdom expanded to become the nation of Siam, whose borders were roughly those of modern Thailand, except for the north, the Kingdom of Lannathai. Ayutthaya was friendly towards foreign traders..........................

Okay! Okay! I don't know how much more I will bother to put here before you realise I am just copy and pasting this all from Wikipedia. Just go read the rest here if you really give a damn. On with my story.

What we did!

Our day in Ayutthaya was easily the cultural highlight of the trip (unless you call getting hammered on the Khaosan Road a cultural experience). The historical park area of Ayutthaya is incredible and there is so much to see you could never fit it all into one day so we thought it best to just hit the 'must sees' as highlighted by my Lonely Planet. On arriving we jumped into a Tuk Tuk so I could fulfil a little promise I made. One of my Christmas gifts to Samantha was an IOU note saying: "IOU one elephant ride around Ayutthaya" so it was off to the Ayutthaya elephant kraal with my fingers crossed that things were back up and running since the flooding of Ayutthaya a few months back. Before heading out I had sent several e-mails first to the elephant camp where the working elephants live and to Eleaid, a charity based in the UK, that are devoted to spreading awareness about Asian elephants and the many problems surrounding them. Instead of going into a long rant about the abusive treatment of many elephants in Thailand (and other parts of Asia) in the name of the tourism industry, I will simply provide a few Links (here, here, here) where you can find out more information. In the mean time rest assured that the kraal we travelled to was recommended by Eleaid and even the camp invited us to go and visit sometime. For 20 baht you can buy baskets of food for the elephants and feed them yourself. The younger elephants are walking freely around the place while the elephants 'saddled up' are behind a barrier but seem to be pretty practiced at stealing food with their trunks while you are not looking. The ride itself was great fun and despite not being able to see much of the temples up close (the elephants can't enter the temple grounds) it was a really enjoyable way to see the area. Besides, I was sitting on a massive elephant, I didn't really care.

They say that when you have no plans then nothing can really go wrong, and that was definitely true of today. We set out to visit some of the larger temples in the area, browse a few markets and get some sun on our pasty limbs and we did just that. From the impressive ground of Wat Phra Si Sanphet to the famous buddha head wrapped in a Banyan tree at Wat Mahathat we strolled (or Tuk Tuk-ed) around Ayutthaya catching up with Claudia (I hadn't seen her in over 5 years!) taking in the sights and sounds and generally having a great time. We had a really pleasant meal by the river and got the ferry over to the train station to head back to Bangkok as the sun set on a wonderful day. The train, however, was a different story. At first we thought we wouldn't make it on as it was so overcrowded, and when we finally did, we realised that we would be spending the next 2 hours standing uncomfortably between other passengers, drink vendors and sacks of rice. It was worse than the Hong Kong MTR at rush hour, and a lot longer too. I apologised to the girls for bringing them back this way (of course the train was my idea...) but we made it eventually back to our hotel. I felt like one of the elephants back in Ayutthaya, tired from a long day of walking around in the sun and craving a good watering and a feed.

What I got was a VERY good feed and plenty of watering (i.e. more Thai whiskey...). We headed out to town at around 2am to see if anything was still open, but were greeted with nothing more than deserted streets. It was the first time we had truly registered the impact of the bombings and it made me feel almost guilty for having so much fun. A cab driver tried to convince us that the only place to party on a night like tonight was Patpong, Bangkok's notorious sleaze street, and we fell for it. I have seen Patpong in full swing, and despite the sleaze and crust, it still holds a strange sort of charm in the same way the Red Light District of Amsterdam does. It is Bangkok institution and everybody goes at some point. However, tonight was a different story. I would seem since the bombing, the 'sensible' tourists had returned home or stayed in (as we should have) and only the lowest of the low were out on the prowl. I mean transexuals are part and parcel of the Bangkok experience and really don't weird me out or even make me turn up an eyebrow, but tonight the street was littered with the sort of Ladyboys that give Ladyboys a bad name. They in turn were surrounded with the sort of people that give people a bad name. In short, it was disgusting and one look at the road led us straight back to the cab and back to the hotel where we made the decision that sleeping is for losers. Instead, we drained out minibars and when sunlight came around felt very silly for doing so, because out flight home was in an hour or two. So we negotiated our way to Bangkok airport in a bleary eyed mess and somehow found our way back to Hong Kong.

I guess the story ends there.

Photo's on my Flickr as Usual!

Mile and Miles of Smiles

Ahhh my desk. My keyboard. My headset. My broken desk chair. All of these things I had forgotten about over the last few days are back once again. Maybe I have become accustomed to my holidays being at least a few weeks long during my life as a student, but 4 days will always be too short. Especially for Thailand!

That said, we crammed a hell of a lot in, and therefore I have a hell of a lot to cram into this post! So let’s get going!

All the way to Thailand, Samantha and I had been arranging mock schedules for the evening which would allow us to fit in a swim in the hotel pool, a nice dinner as well as a few drinks before getting an early night, ready to be fresh faced for my friend’s arrival from Singapore on the morning of the 31st. Like most of these plans nothing happened the way it should have and the night went more like this: We got to the hotel, faffed around in the room for too long, had a delicious Thai meal before doing a bit of shopping on the Khaosan road. After that, there was nothing else to do but get our party hat on and have a corker of a night out dancing to an amazing ska band and hitting the Thai whiskey with reckless abandon. We even managed to fit a swim in but it was at around 2AM, in our underpants, well after the hotel pool had closed. I don't mean to gush, but I guess there is nothing else to say about the night other than it was the sort of night out that you dream about having with a girl.

We woke up far from fresh-faced the next morning, but refused to let it get the better of us and after an awful hotel breakfast we headed meet my friends Julien and Cecile at their hotel on the other side of town. We toyed with getting a Tuk Tuk over to the hotel but after haggling it down from 200 to 150 baht we figured we would get a meter taxi to see the price difference. The cab cost us just under 60 baht (that’s about 1GBP). When we met them and decided to get going on our day tour of Bangkok we stopped worrying about these small sums of money and jumped into a Tuk Tuk to see as much as we could. The day was great and we traveled to several of the more impressive temples of Bangkok, saw the Grand Palace and the largest markets in the city before heading on a longboat cruise down the canals. There are lots of photos of the day (as well as the rest of my trip) on my Flickr.

The Bangkok canal system was an unexpected surprise and a great experience. I never realised the number and length of the canals around Bangkok, nor did I realise the lifestyle of the people who live along them. Bangkok its self is a city as busy and metropolitan as any of the big Asian capitals. Skyscrapers, traffic, pollution and everything else unremarkable about any city in the world. However, a short boat ride transports you to a different world of canals, floating house and bank side monasteries. Watching the families starting their New Years celebrations on the canals while their children swam and fed the fish I felt like we had either gone back in time or I had fallen asleep for a while and the Longboat driver was taking the piss a little and had whisked us off to a distance fishing village for the afternoon. After an hour or so of wide eyed gazing, though, it was back to the smog.

As the sun set over the Chao Phraya River our thoughts turned to the night and the New Year eve party ahead. We had already draining the best part of two bottles of Sang Som (Thai whiskey) between the four of us during the day, so it wasn't going to take much to put us into 100% party mode... We headed back to our hotels with the promise of meeting at our hotel bar later that night to begin our celebration. I'm not even going to bother describing the night in detail. It was the best New Years I have ever had, and that is saying something considering the scale of some NYE parties I have had. I guess it wasn't the scale of the party that defined it though. In Julien, Cecile and Samantha I had the best company imaginable and we made an awesome party unit together, but was more than that. The vibe was electric regardless of the bombings that took place earlier that night. The Khaosan road was packed solid with hundreds of partygoers and the bars and clubs were heaving. People were singing and dancing in the street and the land of smiles cast its spell over all present. There are a thousand and one little stories about what happened at what bar, who sprayed silly strings in whose eyes and who was dumb enough to buy a bunch of knockout buckets (me) but to put it short it was a perfect New Years.

Of course, it finished up with us in the pool in our underpants again...

We woke up the next day feeling like utter crap. Horrible. After ensuring all our loved ones knew we hadn't been blown to bits we set off to see what we could see. Basically, everything we wanted to do went wrong in some way, so we resolved to just wander down to the market area of the Chinatown district of Bangkok. It was all pretty nice, but very crowded and we were all feeling a bit sorry for ourselves. As such, the day was fairly uneventful and most of it was spent reminiscing on the zanier moments of the night before and stopping every 10 minutes to drink water. In the evening we thought it safest not to hit the town as further bomb threats had been made and most international governments has requested tourists avoid crowded spaces in case more bombs went off. They didn't, but if I had gone out the strain of drinking more Thai whiskey would probably have killed me anyway. So we said goodbye to Julien and Cecile who shot off to resume their lives and got an early night ready for our daytrip to Ayutthaya the next day.

Which will be in my next post!!

Photos from the trip HERE!

Thailand! Elephants! Party! Yeah!

Okay, I'm going to take a short break from recounting the past to talk about the future. I am all booked on another trip (albeit a very short one) to Thailand over the New Years holiday. It's not so much of a traveling experience as a quick holiday, but I am excited all the same. The basic plan is this:

30th December: Leave Hong Kong arrive in Thailand and hopefully go out in the evening for a good meal and some night market browsing. No doubt padded out with several beers and some quality banter.

31st December: The big day. Plans are vague but the general idea is to hit the streets of Bangkok during the day and in all likeliness buy far too much Thai memorabilia and have to find a post office to ship it back to my new place in Hong Kong. Then comes the evening. My plan: throw myself into a sea of people and see where the tide takes me.

1st December: A Write off.

2nd December: Early rise and a boat/train/taxi to Ayutthaya for a day of temples and elephants. Well, that’s the plan anyway! For those who don't know, Ayutthaya is the ancient capital of Thailand and lies slightly north of Bangkok. It is a world heritage site and is famous for is numerous Buddhist temples. Which is the main reason we are going, the other being the opportunity to see those temples on elephant back! After that will be an early night back in Bangkok ready for our AM flight.

3rd December: Back to Hong Kong

That’s right, rushed but crammed full of Thai goodness. I got my flights really cheap on a special VISA card only deal from the mighty Zuji. I am really excited about Ayutthaya, especially if the elephant back tours work out. The elephant camp in Ayutthaya was flooded a few months back and all the elephants evacuated but from my research so far it would seem they are back up and running. It comes highly recommended and they take very good care of their elephants by the sounds of things. This is especially important given the plight of many of the performing elephants in Thailand who are terribly mistreated. As for accommodation I am going a bit up market and staying a proper hotel! It is right on the Khaosan Road (which is, by all accounts, where the NYE party action is at) and seems reasonable in quality and price.

I guess that about sums it up, and I hope some of the above links are useful for anybody planning similar trips any time soon. The only other point of note is that I plan to start my very own one-a-day/project365 photography project on the stroke of midnight '06/'07. The basic idea is that you take a photograph every day for an entire year and keep them blogged/flickr'd. I love the idea of being able to really document what stands to be a very exciting year for me in pictures as well as expand my photographic skills. I just invested in a new digital SLR (a second hand Nikon D70 with plethora of accessories for a total bargain) and I am slowly becoming comfortable with the myriad of settings and features. I figured it is a perfect way to develop my technical skills as well as test my creativity in having to come up with something interesting and attractive every day for a year. Not difficult during the countdown to 2007 in the centre of Bangkok, but probably a bit more so on the average Tuesday at work.

So there you have it, my New Years in a nutshell. Now back to Siberia...