A taste of old Siam

When we first started thinking about how to spend our vacation days, we really wanted to make a trip to Cambodia to see Angkor Wat, but the longer we’ve been here, and the more Baht we’ve spent, that dream has sort of fizzled out.  Luckily, our lonely planet Thailand book, provided us with a lot of tempting substitutes.  Siam has been around for hundreds of years, and hundreds of kings, until around fifty years ago when the name changed to Thailand.   Constantly at war with Burmese and Laotian armies, there are plenty of ancient strongholds, temples, ruins, and capitols.   One of the more recent capitols, Ayutthaya is conveniently one hour North of Bangkok, and when we started putting our itinerary together for the long weekend, this was at the top of our list!  Lucky for us, our hostel teamed up with a tour group and provided day-long tours to many of the surrounding tourist attractions, including Ayutthaya!  Tuesday morning we woke up at six, got ready, packed up our backpacks, ate a few pieces of toast, and loaded up in the tour van.  We were one of the first to be picked up, but over the next half hour we stopped be a lot of little guesthouses and boutique hotels, and our van filled up with Koreans and Europeans.  We’re still pretty sure we were the only ones on the trip who spoke English as our native language!  It was an amazing trip and a really meaningful cultural experience.  We made a bunch of stops at different ancient ruins, some original, some restored, and some still in use as Buddhist temples. 

First stop was Wat Phukhao Thong.  This temple was a little bit outside the city, and was built in 1357!  It had been restored at some point, but was still overgrown by plants, and looked like it was starting to lean to one side a bit.

Next stop was Wat Lokayasutha.  This temple had another giant reclining Buddha, but the rest of the structure was mostly destroyed.  Apparently the  architecture in this and a few of the other buildings in Ayutthaya shows the time period that Siam was a Hindu country, but then converted to Buddhism.

We don’t remember the name of the third stop…and we can’t exactly find it anywhere in our tour book, but it was also really cool! It’s still in use and we even saw some monks there being filmed by a film crew. The temple itself was wrapped in a HUGE piece of golden fabric, and every Buddha statue lining the outer wall around the temple was wore matching sashes. It was impressive to see so many Buddhas in one place! Our tour guide informed us that the hand position of these Buddhas represent victory.

Wat Phra Mahathat was a stark contrast from the stop before. The collection of buildings was located in front of the Grand Palace, which is interesting since we thought it reminded us of the temples at the Grand Palace in Bangkok! They were built in 1374 in the same Khmer style as the structures at Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Urge to see ruins fulfilled! The most striking detail of this place was the Buddha images. When Burma invaded the city, they set fire to the buildings and cut the heads off all the Buddha statues—ironic because all of the Buddhas here are in the victory pose. We couldn’t get over how impressive the sight was even now, and wished we could go back in time and see it in its prime. It would have been enormous; the ruins stretched on forever!

Another amazing sight was this Buddha head wrapped in the roots of a bodhi tree. No one really knows why this head was left when the Burmese invaded—perhaps it was abandoned or simply too heavy for the invaders to haul away. It’s a highly photographed monument in Thailand, and is commonly seen on postcards, partially because of the mystery surrounding it but also because Buddhism began after Buddha was enlightened under a bodhi tree. Pretty amazing how fitting it is! When photographing the Buddha head  you are not allowed to stand, because it is disrespectful for your head to be higher than Buddha’s. You’ll get yelled at if you try!

We stopped for lunch at a local restaurant. We don’t have pictures because we were too hungry to document it..but it was amusing to see how differently we ate as compared to the other tourists with us who have probably only been in Thailand for two weeks at most. Most people didn’t even attempt to use the spoon, they were dousing their food in sweet chili sauce, and the girl across the table from us took two bites of rice and nothing else. We, on the other hand, ate like it was our last meal, enjoying the more mild version of these dishes that are more suited for tourist. So much for trying to dispel the myth that Americans eat a ton..

Wat Phra Si Sanphet served as the ancient palace for 117 years. Most of it was rubble, but three main chedi have been reconstructed to give a taste of what the whole collection of buildings would have looked like. The Viharn Phra Mongkol Bopi Buddha was in a nearby hall, and it’s one of the biggest bronze Buddhas in Thailand. For hundreds of years it was exposed to the elements after its temple was burnt down by the Burmese army, and it was further damaged by lightning after that. In 1955 the Burmese prime minister donated 200,000 baht to reconcile what his country did 200 years earlier.

We were quite exhausted after this historical view of Siam, so when we got back to Bangkok we wandered around a nearby market. 

We were doing pretty well at avoiding the vendors until we saw a sign for a foot fish massage. We paused for just long enough that their employee caught us and offered us a deal we couldn’t pass up. Next thing we knew our feet were washed and we were sticking our feet into GIANT tanks full of hundreds of little fishes waiting to nibble at our feet. It..was the tickliest thing in the world. The fish were supposedly eating the dead skin off our feet, and with so many of them chowing down it was as much as we could do to not laugh our heads off. They were thorough, getting in between our toes, around our heels, and even up our calves a little bit. Fifteen hilarious minutes later, our feet were admittedly smoother!

Needing to catch our bus soon, we checked out of the hostel, explored the market a little more, ate some red curry and mango sticky rice, and headed to the bus station. We took one last look at the city and went on our way!

Saying goodbye to our awesome hostel

Party bus on the ride home

After a weekend full of new sights, our familiar Northern Thailand mountains were a welcome sight! We had an awesome view from the front seats on the second story of our bus!!