Ayutthaya's conquests were unsuccessful, however, due to the military support of Ming China, who backed the Sultanate diplomatically and economically. The Ming Admiral Zheng He had established one of his bases of operation in the port city, so the Chinese could not afford to loose such a strategic position to the Siamese. Ayutthaya province had been Thailand's capital in the Krungsri-Ayutthaya era. After epidemic diseaases at Authong city, he relocated people to Ayothaya city. Ayutthaya is not only famous for its ancient buildings, but also for its elephants. Make a ride on one of them, if you like. Ayutthaya is one of them. While I have yet to try some of the staple Thai food, their creativity and spices make any dish incredible. Ayutthaya also sold provisions such as rice and dried fish to other Southeast Asian states. The range of minerals found in the kingdom was limit ed, but tin from Phuket ("Junkceylon") and Nakhon Si Thammarat ("Ligor") was much sought after by both Asian and European traders. Ayutthaya covers an area of 2,556 square kilometres. Ayutthaya society was divided into the haves, the administrators, and the have not, the commoners and slaves. The priesthood was regarded as a separate institution. Ayutthaya was the first destination of any foreigner back in the days of the Kingdom of Ayutthaya and was the location of the first treaties ever signed behind powerful European nations and Siam. Ayutthaya was the capital of the Kingdom of Siam from 1351. The city boasted a wonderful scattering of scores of ancient Khmer temples and was considered one of Indochina´s most magnificent cities.

The sobering part of travel photography is to travel to places without any guarantee of how many if any pictures will be produced or how great the photos will turn out to be.

I arrived to Thailand with modest expectations and accordingly the 5 locations I visited in the Northern part yielded modest photos in quality and quantity. I did not click with the country, for my taste it was too commercial and I decided not to hunt for places spending time and money which that might have been more fruitful.

To find less developed areas for more authentic travel photography Thailand is definitely a place best explored on a motorcycle.

There were special places and moments of course as the above photo illustrates it at Wihaan Phra Mongkhon in Ayutthaya, a town famous for ancient ruins just north of Bangkok.

Read more and see more photos about this stop of my Southeast Asia travel photography trip in Thailand:
All In Ruins At Ayutthaya Sukhothai Phrae Nan and Bangkok, Thailand

NOTE: If you wish to be notified about the publishing date of my Southeast Asia Travel Photography Coffee Table Books please send me your email address via my Contact Form

Ci eravamo lasciati che martedi' mattina eravamo a Bangkok; nel pomeriggio un fantastico treno di terza (si' si', terza) classe in un paio di ore ci ha portato ad Ayutthaya.

Nella ex-capitale della Siam siamo rimasti fino a ieri mattina, dove mediante la combinazione treno di seconda classe + autobus urbano + autobus extraurbano, nell'arco di circa 5 ore siamo arrivati fino a Sukhothai.

Questa mattina abbiamo visitato il Parco Storico in bicicletta (uno spettacolo) e nel pomeriggio altro autobus extraurbano, comodamente in circa 5 ore e mezza - di cui la prima in piedi nel corridoio - ci ha portato a Chiang Mai.  E piu' precisamente al De Naga Hotel, dalla lobby del quale vi sto scrivendo.  Come potete vedere dalla gallery del sito del hotel, compensiamo i disagi (ma che sono anche avventure ed emozioni che spero di poter raccontare presto in prossimi blog) dei trasferimenti :-)

 I also ended up changing guest houses. When i arrived in Ayutthaya i had plans to stay in one guest house on the central island, but on my way there an owner of another house pleaded with me to stay in his. I refused... up until he said "damn lonely planet".. and that is when i felt sorry enough for him to look at the room.... I ended up taking it without doing a thorough examination. Later that night i regreted my choice. It was so filthy and i left early the next morning. But i didn't have the courage to tell this man my reason, all i said was that i had friends in the other place. I wonder why i felt so insecure telling him? But writing this reminds me that i should search for his hostel online so that i could leave an anonymous review. I'm slimy like that.

 What did i see in Ayutthaya? Many temples. Here a temple is called a 'wat'. For some reason, i have a harder time remembering Thai terminology than i did Indian ones. To be honest, seeing wats does not make me feel much anything. Usually the inside of a wat looks like this: a big Buddha in the middle covered in gold, surrounded by smaller golden Buddhas and other figures. It kind of bores me. Sometimes i am able to appreciate the aesthetics and architecture, but stronger is the feeling of irony (the same that i have when i visit Catholic establishments) ... that a house of worship for a faith that preaches simplicity should be adorned so lavishly. Us humans really do love shiny things...

But it's hard to feel negative thoughts when someone, who feels as much pride and love for these temples as my Thai friend does, shows them to you. To witness his zeal and awe is beauty in a way, and there is almost nothing i seek more than sincerity. Sandipap's desire to show and tell me about the wats is dear to me depsite my inability to see much beauty in the wats themselves.

    I took the train to Lopburi at noon. It is only about an hour away from Ayutthaya. Lopburi is a small town famous for its resident monkey (or as my guidebook calls them, the resident delinquets). These Long-tailed Macaque monkeys are everywhere, and because they've lost their fear of humans.. they act just like the street dogs by not paying passing humans any attention. The adolescent monkeys are very energetic and tend to jump on humans. On several occasions, i had these adolescents on my head. They have a very gentle grip. Although they do scratch and bite if provoked (Asya had to get rabies shots last year when one of them bit her). It was SO sad when my camera battery died, depriving me the opportunity to photograph the babies (just born) clinging to their mothers and the females in estras with swollen vaginas. The sex organs of these monkeys are HUGE in comparison to their bodies. The testes are bigger than a large size chicken egg, and the vulva of the females looks big enough to fit my fist. Anyway.. :)

I really enjoyed Lopburi. At night there was a market full of veders selling cooked food, sweets, vegetables, clothes...

In the morning i was depressing over the fact that i couldn't find food to eat. I have a note in my notebook saying (in Thai) that i'm a vegetarian and i show it to street venders. Nearly every vender i had brushed me away saying they had no food for me. Hungry and hot, i started to buy foods i wouldn't usually eat - some pickled vegetable, rice with coconut milk, sweets... everything that i disposed of not long after i bought it. I was becoming so fed up with this food "situation" that i imagined stomping my feet and kicking something (i know, childish! but it was only in my imagination!) And then i saw him...

He was sitting on the ground trying to open an almost empty smothie cup. He didn't succeed.

And with him my mood went up and up and up and i really enjoyed Lopburi. My favorite was this palace...

ps. Thank you for the comments .. <3

I left Bangkok yesterday and arrived in Ayutthaya, an ancient city.  The train ride was supposed to be an hour and a half long, but right at the stop before my destination, the train stopped for two hours.  There was no air conditioning... I can't complain though, the train ticket was only 15 baht.  For those that do not know the BHT to USD conversion - 15 baht is about 50 cents USD.  To leave Bangkok, I walked all the way to the train station from the guesthouse (with all my stuff for three months of travel) although the taxi probably would've cost less than 3 dollars.  Pride?  No.  Because it is a close distance? No, it was half way across the city center.  It was the distinct combination of cheapness and stupidity that apparently creeps up after two weeks of travelling alone in a foreign country.

Ayutthaya is very small and quiet.  It has ruins and the entire city is on an island that is perfect for biking.  I can bike all day going anywhere I want without a map and can't get lost unless I unknowingly cross a bridge.  The bike wasn't that great though - there was only one gear (not one of those 21 speed bikes) and really bad brakes.  Every time I braked, it made a really high pitched sound that large buses usually make: perfect for getting the attention of the hundreds of hungry stray dogs that walk the streets of Ayutthaya.  I already like Ayutthaya more than Bangkok and plan to stay here for at least 3 more nights.

I am not leaving here until I have some decent sketches.  I have only two sketches so far after two weeks of travel and they are clearly worse than the ones from France...  I'll share here a small secret that I have never said to anyone; although I have sketched and painted hundreds of times for school, work, and as a personal hobby, everytime I start one I have a small panic attack that it will be worse than my previous work.  And there is something about getting worse at something I enjoy doing that scares the shit out of me.  Pardon my language, there is really no alternative word.

.. i think i complain to much and need to go to sleep.

also. every time i see babies i get that protective affectionate feeling......  you know what this means...

.. time to find work in an orphanage!

The Tai people were moving southwards into Laos and Thailand from northwest China, probably being squeezed out by the Chinese Han people. They had mastered upland rice agriculture so they started to settle in the northern hill country of both these lands. This was a fairly recent migration and we don't really pick up their story much until the 11th. Century and the Sukhothai Kingdom.

By the 12th. Century we see the movement of Tais further south and the founding of what would be the Thai kingdom's capital of Ayutthaya. The ethnic groups which would have been there originally were Mons and Khmers but we can suspect there was quite heavy Tai integration with these peoples.

Ayutthaya was destroyed by the Burmese in 1767 and the capital of Siam moved south, first to Thonburi and later to Bangkok. The southern movement of the Tais into the central plains of Thailand was probably supported by their ability to farm rice in these lowlands. Irrigation and drainage became the tools of the Tais as they bought more land into cultivation and this can be seen at Ayutthaya and even more so in the Bangkok area.

                        - Percy Bysshe Shelley

From far off, the ruins stood silently, a crumbling mass of orange brick emerging from the flat green plains. A high Khmer-style prang, in the shape of a corncob, is flanked by smaller prangs in eight directions.

Among the half-dozen or so wats that we had visited that day in Ayutthya, Wat Chai Wattanaram attracted me the most. Built in 1629 as a memorial to a Thai king’s coronation, it has stood for almost 140 years before it was put to the torch by the rampaging Burmese invaders.

Now, the temple is simply a site of desolation. As I walked among its ruins, I could hear lines from Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ going through my head. Rows of decapitated Buddhas. Defaced walls and altars. Once magnificent prangs now shorn of their gold. Silence. Indeed, all things, great and petty, inevitably pass into nothingness.

This past weekend we had a couple extra days off for a Thai Buddhist holiday.  Given our long weekend we decided to head down south.  We took an overnight bus from Lampang to Ayutthaya (the old capital of Thailand filled with many ancient ruins).  We were planning on getting dropped off at the Ayutthaya bus station.  Apparently, the Thai idea of dropping someone off at a bus station may actually mean dropping them off on the side of the road -across a highway- from the bus station.  Additionally, if one asks the bus driver if this side of the road stop is in fact the Ayutthaya stop, said bus driver can respond by saying something entirely in Thai- with no mention of the word ‘Ayutthaya’, 'chai' (yes), or 'mai' (no).  We missed our stop and finally confirmed the mistake when we exited the bus, stopped an at the information desk to ask the clerk where we were on our Lonely Planet map.   He looked at the map, turned it once, looked some more, turned it again, and looked some more.  “Ayutthaya bus station?” I ask.      

“No, Bangkok.” We overshot our destination by 2 hours.

Some three hours later we finally reached our destination.  Exhausted.  Our reserved room had been rented out.   Another one would be available in ‘ten minutes’.  The new room available would cost double they told us, because it would have air-con; a luxury we had decided to go without.  Nonetheless, they said it woud be ready in ten minutes, and we needed a place to rest our head.  An hour later our room still wasn’t ready.  “Ten minutes,” they lady said again.  Followed by “watch a movie.” Hmmmm...

After we got settled into our room we bucked up, slammed some iced coffee, rented a motorbike, and hit the town. We had three city maps with us: one provided by the Lonely Planet book, one from the guesthouse, and one from the motorbike shop.  Funniest thing though, none of them looked the same.  Lonely Planet had the most legible one, the guesthouse one had the most streets, and the motorbike shop one had the most ruins.  The latter two were very poor photocopies and mostly in Thai, so we tried to combine everything onto the Lonely Planet one.  Unfortunately, that one sort of ‘blew away’ and needless to say we got utterly turned around. 

One of the roads we were driving on was being blocked off my policemen.  A police officer was standing on the non-shoulder side of the road and waving for Vince to pull over to the shoulder.  Oddly enough, their gesture for ‘pull over’ looks sort of like ‘come over here’. Vince nearly ran the officer down, dodged him at the last minute, and then continued to drive on past.  I thought for sure there would be police sirens chasing us.  There weren’t. In retrospect I’m sure they just looked at us and thought, “stupid farangs”.

That evening we met up with two teacher/friends who live in the area.  We spent the night laughing over cheap beer and crazy classroom stories.  The next morning we got some breakfast, Thai rice soup.  We managed to explain to the cooks that we didn’t want any blood in our soup.  Unfortunately, we didn’t realize it might be full of intestine. 

Way to go, Vince, intestines on a hangover.  Was it as good as Mac’n’Cheese?

After breakfast we rented bicycles and biked around the old town area.  It was over 100 degrees once you weighed in humidity, and bottles of water were easily our most costly item of the day.  The ruins were from the 14^th century and what was left of them was stunning.  Burmese warriors attacked and destroyed Ayutthaya in the 1700’s.  At that time they decapitated all of the heads from the sitting Buddha statues.  Now I know what you’re thinking… you would want to take a picture with your head in place of the Buddha’s head.  Don’t even think about it.  Check out the second picture in on the top row of this sign:  

Also, as I’m sure you all know Asians have a difficult time pronouncing R’s and often replace them with the letter L.  Something is wrong with this sign.. Can you figure it out??

In all seriousness, we had a very good time in Ayutthaya.  Many incredibly old and wonderful things to look at.

I think my favorite site was actually a tree found in one of the ancient wats.  Enshrouded in the roots is one of the decapitated Buddha heads.   It blends right into the tree.  If I didn’t know better I would think the tree actually grew this face itself.  Beautiful.

Every time King Naresuan answers a prayer, people put a rooster at the feet of his monument in Ayutthaya, Thailand.

Dear Sivalai DayTrippers,
Thank you for coming along. Hope you all had a great time. The temples, museum, muffler, fried mushroom, sweatin’, Häagen-Dazs, ants, golds, stupas and so on. It was surely quite adventurous one might says. Sooo let’s do it again soon! :)
Cheerio,
Oillie

Ayuthaya is well worth a visit, especially for those who are fascinated by Thailand’s unique and colorful history!

We are arranging a day trip to Ayutthaya on Sun 22nd JUN 08.
If you are interested, please sign-in! (Check the message board at Sivalai Place) The last date to sign up is Tue, 18th JUN 08. At least 12 ppl > roughly about 500 bht each.
(Van, patrol, driver’s tips & expressway voucher)

AND It would be nice to get together though - NEIGHBOURLY LOVE!
ps: bring your friends if you’d like \^_^/

* We took an overnight train ride to a little town near the Cambodian boarder. I woke up to a blurry eyed E. who immediately threatened to, "write a letter to my congressman" about the clinking and clanking that kept him up all night. We still throw that phrase around when things aren't to our liking and it cracks us up every time. * Getting engaged in Lumpini Park * Climbing the concrete bleachers to watch Azerbaijani play Pakistan in a match at a massive Thai soccer stadium. * Going to Koh Phra Thong for E's birthday and waking up to the sound of monkey laughter. * Lazy jet lagged early mornings. * And of course, multiple trips to Suan Jatujak.

Here are the photos I do want to share! They are from our trip to Ayutthaya, the ancient capitol of Thailand. They were taken with my 35mm film camera and I scanned them to monster size, apparently. I have spent all the time my headache and I are able to try and fix the issue. So enjoy my super-sized vacation photos! Fries with that?