Met Darcy Lee Tucker, an upfront but pretty easy going (for New York) American the previous night and we got on very well and decided to visit Ayuthaya together. Loi need not worry as not only is she getting married in July, she is also getting married to a woman so the chances of anything happening were not entirely high! I'll quote Darcy's email to her friends about the day....
Ayuthaya was a bit of a letdown, I must say. And I'm glad that we didn't waste a whole day at the end of the trip going there. I also think that after Cambodia/Angkor, most things of that ancient ruin nature aren't as mesmerizing anymore, you know?Even my travel pal for the day, Chris, who hasn't been to Angkor yet, wasn't THAT impressed either.
We started out 8am armed with the wrong train times, as I guess the train is always changing...it wouldn't have been an issue except that we had one of those taxi drivers who wanted to NOT use the meter and then drove you in a big out of the way circle getting you to your destination. I point out that he was going in a circle and he played dumb and said, "circle? you want to go to train station? where is this circle?" I smiled and kept my cool Asian head and said, "the circle that you just drove us around b/c you want the extra baht!" Oh ha ha ha.
Then, he wanted to know where we were going and we were dumb once again and told him the truth. Well, then of course, he wants to know why we don't want him to take us there? Now, here is the difference between the New Yorker traveler and the Brit traveler. To this question, I say, "because we're taking the train." End of story. That's that. But no....Chris is all, "oh we're meeting some friends and they wouldn't all fit in your car and I we have to go to the train station to see them" and blahblahblah. Soooo polite and apologetic about the whole business. And why were we taking the train? Because it's 14B (35 cents) and you've driven us in circles for 20 minutes and already gouged us for 80B ($2)!
He does (eventually) get us to the train station and then claims to not have any change. So, we scrambled around and because we didn't have any more small coins and the bastard ended up with a 10B tip even though he'd already ripped us off.
And...we've just missed our train by two minutes.
11am and we're finally in Ayuthaya. Coming out of the train staion we are, in that typical tout fashion, attacked. Once again, in my typical New Yorker fashion, I ignore all calls of attack and proceed forward, knowing the the 2B (5 cents) ferry transporting me cheaply across the river, lies directly ahead of me. But...I've lost Chris who is too polite to say no or ignore then and is practically having a cup of tea with one particularly aggressive tout. He's gotten so far that Chris is now looking at photographs of where this man will take us (for how much money??!!) and is commenting nicely of them.
Finally.
The taxi/tuk tuk mafia is so oppressive that they make you lose sight sometimes and you want to escape them so badly, you blindly wind through the crowds.
This is a mistake, because then you don't realize you are walking past all of the good, cheap, bicycle rental shops.
The heat was rather oppressive and I think we rented the villages crappiest bikes to tool around with for the day. Lonely Planet had said that you could walk to the major ones but if you wanted to really see others, you'd be best off with a bike or going with a moto(expensive).
We thought, OK, we'll go around by foot and then find a bike....wellllll...all of the bike rental places were at the beginning by the town (naturally) and by the time we started looking for a bike, there really weren't any or, like the place we eventually found, they were shit. And the owner wanted 40B ($1) each for them and it was a half day by that point. We'd heard that it should only be 30B (75 cents) for the day, so we got him down to that at least, but oy.
At least we got a giggle watching him takes our bike locks out of the freezer! They weren't cold at all, so remember when this when your fridge breaks down, it probably has a thousand uses you've never even thought of. Need a place to organize those messy tools laying around in your garage?!
For the rest of the day, we longingly gazed at everyone's brand new shiny bikes as we cursed our rusty overpriced pieces of shit. They were so bad you wobbled taking off. I'm surprised we made it back without blowing the ancient tires. I never even bothered to lock it up.
We did see some nice ruins, but there was little information about them in our guidebook and even less at the sites themselves.
Basically we spent the entire day cursing the heat and wondering if that was yet another chedi or stupa.
Chris was bound and determined to find the ones listed far away on the LP map and that's when they wild dogs came at us. Luckily we escaped and they were probably more bark than bite, but at least it took us off down a village road that doesn't see too many 'farangs' and the cries of "hello" and giddy children waving and running down the street made the day worthwhile in itself.
Coming back into town we stopped at a stoplight and waited for the light to change...as did the elephants and cars and motos. Yep, four elephants waiting at the stoplight. You don't see that everyday. We asked someone and they said the elephants were going back to their camp and well...that's the road! So it is...
Naturally we missed the Bangkok bound train by two minutes again and were eaten alive by mosquitos while waiting another hour and a half for the next train.
I think I've been represented a little harshly and ended up being described as Higgins from Magnum! It was a fun day out though...
Posted by cmelikian at December 10, 2003 03:44 AM