The bus dropped us off at some random location in Ayutthaya, so it took us about 20 minutes of map viewing, with locals laughing at us, before we figured out our route to the guest house - note that this is starting to become an unfortunate theme. Our guest house had a charming garden, a scary enthusiastic poodle, and the most awesome high tech fan ever. The fan had a remote control, and you could make it start and stop where ever you wanted! We had AC, but didn't need it with Super Fan around.
Eric was still fighting jet lag, so he and Steff turned in early. Bryan and I went out to explore this wild new town. We discovered that everything closes by 7:00, except for the crazy online gaming centers. We passed one that I believe had every teenager in town inside. The only other creatures out past 8:00 PM were the hundreds of street dogs. Bryan insisted that they were ignoring us, I think they were plotting their attack. We successfully navigated our way to the local night market (by "we" I mean "Bryan") to find dinner. The market was really neat. It was located right by the river, and it seemed to be more for the locals. This was one of the few times on the trip that most menus and signs were mainly in Thai characters only, with little or no English translation. We stood by a fruit shake/coffee stand for about 15 minutes trying to figure out what the vendor was making and what we could order. He finally made us come over, and pointed to the fruit and wide variety of flavored somethings in jars. We ended up ordering he largest, cheapest, and most delicious fruit shakes I've had on this trip. This magical fruit shake was followed by life cereal and sleep. Good day.
The next morning Bryan and I went for a run - although I may have made us run too far and fast due to the street dogs scaring me to death. Oops!
We met up with Eric and Steff as they moved into one of the cute cottage-like garden bungalows. Bryan and I decided to stay in the main building because it was cheaper and we had Super Fan. We weren't staying in the main back packer area of Ayutthaya, so we went to one of the more authentic local places for breakfast. The restaurant served some sort of random pork spice noodle soup? Steff and I had rice. The boys insisted the soup was good. We didn't believe them.
Ayutthaya is known for it's wats (temples) and ruins on pretty much every corner. The older temples were preserved as ruins after a Burmese attack on the city long ago. Our favorite wat of the morning was one that featured a face of Buddha within the twisted trunk of the same type of tree that Buddha sat under.
A couple of the other sites we wanted to visit were a bit further out, so Eric suggested we rent motor bikes for the day. Bryan and I had never ridden motor bikes before. Bryan was speeding about and did great. I, however, was nick named "little put put" by Steffany. Although I give her no room to judge because she refused to drive the bike, and rode on the back or Eric's. Although that did work out because she became out navigator and photographer. Somehow, we all managed to meet up every where we were going after being separated due to: going too fast, too slow, and fighting 4 lanes of rush hour traffic. I give us all gold stars for the day.
After a day of temple exploration we had a lovely dinner and discussed our next place of adventure. We decided that two people should return the bikes, and two should go to the travel agency to book the agreed upon transportation to the near by national park. I was a little over the motor bikes, so that task was left to Eric and Bryan. Steff and I headed over to the travel agency and were informed that all of our discussed plans for the next day were impossible due to various reasons and time conflicts. This prompted Steffany and I to babble like idiots to the very nice travel agent about how hard it is to make plans, we hate making decisions, and we needed to find "the boys." She must have thought we were insane.
She called a tuk-tuk for us to go back to the hotel, get he boys, run the new choices by them and come back before the travel agency closed. Perfect plan! We ran through the garden, into the guest house, only to find that Eric and Bryan weren't there.
"Where are they?!"
"They should be where they're supposed to be!"
"They must have returned the bikes by now right??"
I sprinted past the tuk-tuk driver (who is laughing at us) down he street to the motor bike rental place.
Me: ::gasp:: "Did our friends return the bikes???"
Motor bike guy: ::points to the bikes I'm standing right beside::
Me: "Ooh ok... Did you see which way they went??"
Motor bike guy: "My friend" ::points up the street toward the guest house::
Me: "They went back to the guest house? Drat! Where did they go? We were just there!" ::runs away::"
Steff and I jumped back in the tuk-tuk, and asked the driver to drive slowly so we could keep an eye out for the boys. We were still ranting and raving in the back when we saw the boys walking up the street from 7 Eleven!
Me & Steff: "THERE THEY ARE!!! Stop!!" "Both of you get in here!!"
At first they ignored us thinking we were tuk-tuk drivers hassling them for a ride.
Eric: "Where are we going?"
Me & Steff: "Just get in!!!"
Tuk-Tuk driver to he boys: "haha, you're in big trouble!"
We explained all of the transportation and activity options and issues in one frantic breath. Of course, they were very confused, had no idea what we were talking about, and were offering us banana candy in the middle of our train schedule speech.
We arrived at the travel agency, Steff and I slowed down and calmly explained our options. We sadly didn't have time for the national park, so we decided to spend the next day in Ayutthaya and take a sleeper train to Chiang Mai at night.
We all went back to the guest house to play rummy in he garden. We learned that Steff is a very aggressive rummy player...
The next morning we went to the backpacker area for breakfast, dropped off our packs at the travel agency. Realizing we didn't really have any plans for the day, we booked a boat ride around the island for he late afternoon. While we were in the office we also over heard the girl who worked there talking to her friend about how so many guys had come in yesterday asking to go to the "special" massage parlor. We thought this was hilarious because 1. Who goes to the tourist information center asking about this?! 2. She actually takes you there!
Unfortunately, as soon as we left the tourist office, we still had nothing to do until 4:00. Ayutthaya's attraction is mainly the temples, and we were a bit templed out after yesterday. We ended up doing the hip thing in town - going on the Internet. We each paid 10 b (about $0.30) for an hour of Internet time.
Then, we took a tuk-tuk over to see the elephants in the center of town. They give rides around the park, but we just watched the ones in the coral.
Highlights:
- One of the elephants punched Eric with his trunk.
- Another elephant pulled Bryan by the arm toward the pen, but lost interest when he saw Bryan didn't have any food.
- Two elephants started having sex. This prompted about 40 digital cameras to instantly be pulled out to capture the tender moment.
One of the volunteer workers from England showed us around.
Volunteer guy:"These are the two new baby elephants, this is where we feed them.. Oh, and that elephant right there killed four people" ::calmly points to huge elephant with giant curved tusks, standing 10 feet away.::
We learned there were a few wild "killer elephants" that the center had purchased to train, rather than have them put down. Wonderful, but I did keep a close eye on those tusks while walking by...
It was a bit bitter sweet seeing the elephants. On one hand, many were happy and healthy. The two babies were born there were adorable. They ran around chasing each other and playing. So cute. On the other, many had come from poor conditions and were still suffering from "zoo syndrome" (rocking back and forth). This is caused by being in captivity away from other elephants for too long. It's so sad to see the negative effects close up, and wonder about treatment of the many elephant-featured activities Thailand.
The time flew by, I don't think any of us were ready to leave. It was so interesting to see how closely everyone interacted with the elephants, and learning a bit about them. They accept volunteers and let you completely take care of "your" elephant for the duration of your stay. Steff and I are determined to come back. We really wanted to do a lot of volunteer work on this trip but discovered that most programs charge a donation fee for the volunteer experience. A generally rather large fee that we simply could not afford.
We managed to not get sprayed by the elephants bathing in he river while getting back in our boat. The rest of the ride around the island was very relaxing. We got to see some if the river side wats while the sun set. All the locals waved at us as we went by, especially the very enthusiastic children.
We treated ourselves to a cheese plate and cocktails. Steff and I were waaaaay more excited about this than the boys. Cheese is one of our main staples back at home, and there's just not enough in Asia. The only problem was our cheese plate was being prepared by a very slow, very grumpy, old British man. I think I could have flown to Wisconsin, learned how to make cheese, invented and created a new type of cheese that gives you super powers, use these powers to flap my arms and fly, flown myself back to Thailand, and given my friends this new perfectly cubed cheese before this guy was able to cut two pieces of cheddar. To conclude: mad-crazy-fancy cheese-in-a-zip-lock-bag-dash to the train station .
We forgot that everything runs on Thai time = the train was an hour late.
We all had our own bunk beds on the train. I really had to resist saying:
"Neat! It's just like in the movies!"
I am told the train came to a few screeching halts, was bumpy, and stopped about 200 during the night. I slept the whole time, so I'll have to take everyone's word for it.
We awoke to a waaaay too chipper man selling "fresh" orange juice at 6:00 AM. It did have a cute anime princess character on the lid, so I wasn't too angry with him. The train was running about two hours late, no surprise. It was a really lovely morning though. The countryside was beautiful, breakfast was good, we all shared headphones and iPods, and relaxed before arriving in Chiang Mai.
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