Ancient temples in Ayutthaya

 

almost all the statues were missing heads

Travel blog time!  Eye and I just visited Ayutthaya, and somehow it felt a bit new to me, even though we've visited there at least twice before.  Only once on a temple tour, that I remember, and that's been awhile, so maybe it was only that.

It will help comparing this experience to visiting Sukhothai and Siem Reap.  Ayutthaya is the least ancient, by a good bit, only on the order of 300 to 400 years old.  Sukhothai is the earlier capital of Thailand, an earlier version of it at least, with the Cambodian temples, that include Angkor Wat, that much older (I think; I should add Wikipedia references before finishing a version of this).  Eye was trained as a tour guide so I kept hearing about history specifics, but to me it was more about the experience than collecting up and placing facts.  Google's input:

Ayutthaya is a city in Thailand, about 80 kilometers north of Bangkok. It was capital of the Kingdom of Siam, and a prosperous international trading port, from 1350 until razed by the Burmese in 1767.

250 years ago then, going back to 600+ on the early side.  Let's check the Sukhothai Kingdom:

The kingdom was founded by Si Inthrathit in 1238 and existed as an independent polity until 1438, when it fell under the influence of the neighboring Ayutthaya after the death of Borommapan (Maha Thammaracha IV).

2021 loy krathong, the best part of celebrating it in Sukhothai

Compared to those other historical places Ayutthaya had always seemed a bit too re-developed, with old temples mixed back in to where the city had been developed again.  "Developed" might give the wrong impression, conjuring an image of a dated but newish context, more how Chiang Mai comes across.  Ayutthaya has a Bangkok Chinatown sort of dated feel, as if it was all put there in the 1940-50 range, with old-style wood houses mostly replaced, but 70 years plenty of time for more recent additions to take on a dated look and feel.  Pictures will help show how that goes.

We did a bike tour on the one main day of our outing.  It was a short weekend trip, going up on Friday, coming back on Sunday.  Ayutthaya should be on the order of an hour away from where we live, so it's still reasonable, just not so relaxed.  The bike tour was Eye and I, no group.  It was just fantastic slowing the pace riding on beat up old cruiser bikes, getting a closer look at everything.  There is a spacious and open environment historical park setting there; somehow for moving in and out of that zone by car I didn't get the same sense of it before.  

A pass to visit 6 main temples cost 220 baht, or about $6; it was nice getting back to the opposite cost range than we experienced in Honolulu recently, for about 7 weeks of stay there.  $6 might not buy you two bottles of water from a vending machine there, and something like a burger is going to be 15-20.

There were foreign tourists there, just not so many.  You tend to see the same 20 or 30 people doing the same circuit, and beyond that everyone seemed to be local Thais.  Surely some were from Bangkok; it wouldn't be easy to tell.

In online forums people joke that backpacker-theme tourists always wear elephant pants, also called painter's pants, and of course that's a completely real thing.  Maybe a third of all tourists had them on, as if they were onto something we were missing.  

elephant pants!  I wanted to ask tourists to pose in them but it seemed like too much.

Tourists, like us, favored bikes over driving, and it made perfect sense why that was.  Our rental cost 50 baht, $1.50, but beyond cost it felt completely right, slowing the pace and being closer to those places.  In visiting Siem Reap we would hire a tuk-tuk driver for the day, and drive up in Sukhothai, but biking was great.  Until it wasn't great; we kept zig-zagging around the city, seeing one more cool temple just a bit outside the inner circle, until it added up to 6 hours of touring, then finally 8, too long for sitting on a bike seat.  I'm still feeling it, two days later.

Visiting those places always gives you a unique reverential feel, as if the weight of history is condensed right there.  Those temples were burned by Myanmar (/ Burma) when that country ended the Ayutthaya empire by invading and destroying them, stealing the wealth of that empire, no doubt slaughtering many inhabitants, and destroying as much as they could.  It was especially eerie how charred so much of it was, with almost every Buddha statue sitting charred and incomplete, with almost every head removed.  But it didn't feel so somber, to me.  The energy was ok, as if the weight of that tragedy had lightened over time, and the indominable Thai spirit retained a high degree of spiritual power even based around semi-restored ruins instead of whole historical buildings.

Angkor Wat, and the other temples in Cambodia, have a vast scale and deeper past lending them a different kind of energy.  There are more temples there, across a broader area, left much more natural and open, with fantastic reconstruction of what had been there earlier, in much more expansive temple forms.  

awhile back, at the iconic Tomb Raider site

Related to Sukhothai, the new city never grew up around there to the same extent either, and leaving ruins open as a less crowded and city-enclosed space gives that former Thai capital a completely different feel.  To some limited extent Ayutthaya had thrived again, as a tourism center, and local community.  Tourism in Thailand isn't thriving now, in the wake of terrible covid disruption, but tourism areas coming back to life again is grounds for a different kind of optimism.

It's just out of the rainy season now, only a week or two past it, and the huge mud levees and sand-bag barriers still there are a testament to how close it was to being a disastrous late rainy season.  Two more weeks of heavy rain would've flooded there, and elsewhere.  Eye and I were in Honolulu right up until the very end of that, from the beginning of September through the third week of October, returning to mold growing on a lot of the wood surfaces in the house, and piles of leaves in the driveway showing where waters had collected and receded last.  In the last 15 years this house had never been empty for nearly two full months like that.  Right at the end it occurred to me that my stored tea might have molded, but it hadn't.

everything on the inside was on the high risk side of that mud retaining wall

Culture shock is for people spending longer like that somewhere; it just felt like a vacation outing there.  Strange at first, since we hadn't traveled in a form much like that during covid, even though we did get out within Thailand quite a bit.  It's different visiting truly local areas, versus beach communities, and places like Sukhothai.  That was one year ago; last Loy Krathong, the Thai holiday when people float small boats, krathongs, that carry away your sins.

The main defining theme this time was not having the kids with us; they stay in Honolulu, finishing the school semester, living with their grandmother.  It was a stretch for me to work out months on end remotely, and going without an income during an extended location change wasn't an open option.  It might've made sense to have just one of us return, or either Eye or I remain stationed in Honolulu instead of her mother, but somehow that plan was selected.  I don't like spending a day without them, never mind two months.  Eye loves the break, the freedom to return to personal interests, losing the pressure to supervise their meals and life, but I don't.  I call them once or twice a day to check in.

Local foods there were nice, I guess, and experiences with local markets, especially one that looked a bit different than any I've visited before, which is saying something.  We test drove tiny Toyota smart cars, kind of a random thing, walking past where that was set up, in a small but pleasant park space.  I guess we reconnected as a couple, to some extent?  Not fighting due to reduced stress and demands is as positive as any of the rest of that, to me.  I don't fully get it. 

inside that market area, like an ancient version of a mall

the food area there, already closed in the afternoon

how night markets look

It was cool staying in an old-style, pleasant three star hotel, a rating that means a specific thing here.  Per the Thai ranking four stars is where places are nicer, where the hotel breakfast is actually better, the pool is less janky, and everything doesn't look dated.  Still, I love places like that, maybe more than the slightly higher level versions.  The broader history there has a pleasant feel, like in the temples, just across a different context.  The main place we visit in Korat over and over is like that, just a good bit nicer, an Imperial chain hotel there.  Back to the temples instead, only at one point did I directly feel the energy of one place, like a pleasant sort of dizziness, at the Wat Mahatat grounds, not really near any structure or shrine in particular.  Violent deaths happened everywhere there, but that energy was positive.

I've definitely accomplished a meandering, random travel blog account, more about my own feelings than what someone else might experience.  My feelings would've been completely different with two kids in tow, an older one complaining about every local meal, and a younger one bringing a bright spirit to every moment and aspect that others could marvel over, as I constantly do.  Old places have energy, but those two kids' old souls have more power yet, and local spirits must be happy to get a visit from their sort.

those smart cars, in a cool test track park

posing with children in traditional clothes

one amazing temple after another

these looked stunning at night, but 8 hours into the bike tour I had stopped taking pictures

it is considered bad form to ride elephants now, causing suffering for them

a lighted pathway marked a running race, which we were so close to biking through

fields and ponds made for a great touring setting