Ayuthaya

We visited Ayuthaya last week. Ayuthaya was the first capitol of Thailand, from 1350 to 1767. The capitol was moved to Sukhothai after the Burmese sacked the city of Ayuthaya in 1767. Now there is a modern city and a big ruin complex.

We went to Ayuthaya the expensive way, tour group. Instead of going straight to Ayuthaya, which we would have done if we'd gone by train, our bus stopped at the Royal Summer Palace first. The Royal Summer Palace only has two asian style buildings, the rest are western style. It was built by King Chula in the early 1900s, after he went on a trip to Europe. The King who built it had 70 some odd wives, and roughly the same number of kids. Because he had so many kids and wives, there are a lot of houses on the grounds. Also at the palace, there is a memorial to all his children who died when they were still young, and to a wife who died because of his own law. The law was that the royal family was untouchable. So, when the barge carrying the queen to the summer palace sank, nobody dared touch her to save her from drowning, so she died. Later the king changed the law.

After seeing the palace, we drove to the main Ayuthaya ruin complex. At the main ruin complex, you can ride an elephant if you want to (we didn't). There are a lot of ruins and decapitated buddhas. The buddhas are decapitated because when the Burmese sacked the city, they cut off all the heads of the buddhas to find the gold ones.

It's not all ruins though. There is a working wat too. The wat was destroyed when the Burmese sacked Ayuthaya, eventually one of the Thai queens restored it. A while after restoring it, the queen decided the buddha inside should be covered in gold leaf. Nowadays the wat has many people, farang and locals, praying to or looking at the magnificent, if dusty, buddha.

After the main ruin complex, we drove to the ruins which are famous for the buddha head in the bodhi tree roots. We slipped away from the guide to look at the ruins on our own. Mom tried to take a picture of the rest of us on a grassy patch on one of the ruins, but a tour guide who probably didn't have any authority at all told us to get down. We discovered the sign saying "don't climb" on the other side. After those ruins, we went for a very short stop at a reclining buddha who was covered in so much cloth you could probably clothe about 1,433 people if you use one square yard of cloth per person.

After the ruins we drove through a lightening storm (with lots of rain), to a boat which had a buffet lunch. We went down the river to Bangkok on the boat. Being on the river was fun, especially since after lunch I went up and sat on the deck right above the driver. The river was quite crowded, and there were a lot of really small boats towing very large almost overfilled barges.