Thailand #2
Dec. 26th, 2016 08:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miss_squiddyDay 3: Ayutthaya
Our first destination this morning was the Bang Pa In Summer Palace. I have to be honest. I was expecting something similar to the Grand Palace, just a bit further out (in a Buckingham Palace - Windsor Palace sort of way). It was a bit of a drive from Bangkok but we suddenly turned off the morotrway and started making our way along smaller and smaller roads. Very oddly, although a lot of the land was agricultural, we only really saw crops and not many animals at all. When we arrived at the Palace we made our way into a small (and not terribly grand) entrance hall for a passport check - and then out into what appeared at first just to be gardens.
The Summer Palace actually consists of beautiful gardens, parkland and lakes with ornamental buildings dotted around throughout. We first visited a small shrine then made our way to a recreation of a 'European' bridge (which had a frankly terrible mish-mash of knock-off classical figures and fairies cemented to it but you could see what they had been going for) - and then to a pavilion overlooking a lake where we bought bread and fed it to the fish - and turtles! (There were some real whoppers in there too!) Apparently, it's a Buddhist thing to do...
There was a really lovely ornamental pavilion in the middle of the lake: all gold columns and layered pointy roofs with wiggly gables and a stupa on the top. We couldn't get to it, but it did look wonderful reflected in the water! We saw the summerhouse (more gaudy Classical sculpture) and the Palace (very small and decorated in European and Colonial styles - but with a whopping great throne in the middle of what would have been the main Reception room... We visited a Chinese pagoda decorated in red and gold which was home to the royal offices and climbed an odd sort of lighthouse looking thing (probably a viewing tower) which had the most wonderful marble floors - and we saw brilliant topiary styled to look like a herd of elephants, hippos, snakes and all sorts of other animals!
We made a short journey to our next destination: Wat Phanan Cheong - Quite a big and popular temple complex which at first glance seemed a bit naff and something for the Chinese tourists - but actually home to the Giant Buddha (a huge sitting figure which basically had the building built around it). Weirdly, we arrived at prayer time so lots of people were sitting on the floor with trays full of offerings getting ready to follow a chant - so we had to pick our way through them and get safely to the side: it seemed to be a very popular place! Outside, around the edges of the temple were lots of stalls bulk selling incense sticks and flower garlands and anything else you might need for large scale worship. Interesting place - I would have liked a few more minutes just to take a look around...
We didn't have a lot of time though as we needed to make our way to Wat Yai Chai Mongkol. This was a totally different sort of place. We were now in a UNESCO Heritage Area so the stupa here were in ruins, looking like great bare brick constructions. However, as the temple was still active, they had been wrapped with huge bows of golden fabric. We made our way in and - surprise! - just around the corner we found another enormous stone reclining Buddha swathed in orange fabric from the neck down. But as we looked, someone began to pull the fabric off, and Buddha's golden robes were revealed! We also noticed that the spirit house here (a small shrine on legs which is devoted to the ancestors or gods) was filled with Doraemon!
It was here, at a small shine that Chaiyan showed us how to show devotion. You can light a candle and then incense sticks, give a lotus flower - and also apply a small square of gold leaf to the statue of your choice. Of course, I got a blim burn from the incense and my gold leaf blew away - so the gods were obviously trying to tell me something!
We had one more treat in store before lunch: Chaiyan took us to a rather bleak looking street to see candyfloss being made. Of course we were all expecting a sugar mill and a chap with a stick - possibly doing something clever and making funny shapes like animals or something - but that wasn't what we got! We had seen quite a few stall along the side of the road selling something that I had presumed to be noodles. It was in fact Candy Floss Roti. This stuff looks a bit like the hair from a cheap joke shop wig and is sold wrapped in a small, soft fat crepe type thing. It tastes of the sugariest sugar you could ever imagine. I had one bite and was done - but some of the others really liked it. We had a nice chat to the chaps who were making it in their little shack - they were Muslim and only Muslims make the candy floss: it's a sort of family secret.
If you've ever seen rock being made, it all starts out in the same way. Sugar is heated up until it turns into a big golden blob, then it is slapped onto a slab and hand rolled until it becomes a sort of long fat barley sugar. Then things get a bit odd. Something else (I think it might have been a mix of flour or sugar and water but I'm not sure) is added and this seems to add some sort of impurity to the mix so that as it is stretched out it begins to splinter. Every time it is pulled, more of the mix is sucked in and more of the sugar splinters. It starts to look like straw and then long blonde hair - and then bad wig! We had lots to take away: I think Dan and Tessa ate most of it!
After our lunch, we visited Wat Chiwatthanaram which was just beautiful! Here we begin to get into the Lara Croft/Angkor Wat sort of territory. It was a relatively small site and hand one large central stupa with a square boundary wall and eight sort of gateways surrounding it. Other smaller stupas were planted in the landscape around it. Lots of the Buddha statues here (there are hundreds at every site) were either headless of smashed completely to pieces (something to do with a Burmese invasion). We had a good time exploring this one - climbing up and down staircases, wandering through gateways, looking at weird insects and just enjoying the ruinous nature of the place!
As we arrived at our next site, Wat Phra Si Sanphet, we spotted elephants wandering up the road! (I am not very keen on the idea of people riding on elephants at all - but it was a bit magical to see them just wandering along the pavement with silks all over their backs and huge parasols over the seats on top...) This site was similar to the other - but much larger! There was a row of very large and imposing stupa in the centre (which looked very similar to the one at the Grand Palace, just without all of the gold leaf and adornment) and lots of crumbling walls and columns surrounding them. At this site I was actually allowed (at last) to climb up all of the steps to the 'doorway' of a stupa (you can't go inside because they are filled with bodies and royal treasures and the like so they are all sealed up - but some of them have sort of fake entrances anyway with spaces for statues or shrines in them). We also met some apprentice monks (most young men in the country are encouraged to spend a year in a sort of National Monk Service to learn some religious values) - so they were on some sort of history trip and were all giggling and taking photos on their phones. They posed for a couple of photos, but it was pretty cool just to see them wandering around the site in groups wearing their orange robes.
Just down the road, we took a quick look at Wat Phra Mahathat. It's the same, but not as good as the two we'd just been to: but with one exception - a Buddha's head enveloped in the roots of a Banyan tree! Who needs Angkor Wat now??? I admit, not quite as cool as seeing roots intertwining a whole city, but still not comparable to anything I have ever seen before!
With our travelling done, we checked into the Kantary Hotel, which was probably the biggest hotel in Ayutthaya. The rooms were pretty weird in that they included a whole mini kitchen and were all for smokers (so a little stuffy), but there was an excellent rooftop pool with a hot tub and the hotel cafe specialised in ludicrously enormous cakes and happy hour offers. It did the job.
Day 4 - Travelling to Sukhothai
Our morning began with a trip over the river on a pretty ancient car ferry. We were now quite some distance from Bangkok and a fair way off the routes used by the large coach tours - as evidenced by the other passengers on the car ferry all being local people who were quite surprised to see us and wanted to take photos with us! Chaiyan was taking us a little off the route of the advertised tour to drop in a few of his favourite places - and this included Wat Tha Sung - or the Glass Temple. Again, very obvious as we were the only Western tourists in the place (although there were quite a few Thai families who had popped in to take their own photos)... The glass temple is at first glance unusual for the giant golden statues of kings and other important people who line its threshold. But once you have walked through the gates you see quite a modern building which is quite plain - aside from the beautiful sparkly silver rooftops. Inside there is a HUGE room with a golden Buddha at one end and a golden coffin containing the mummified body of a monk at the other. But in-between are hundreds of thin columns, all of which are covered with mirrored tiles. The entire place sparkles - especially because the floor is polished and the ceiling is mirrored! It's a little disorientating, but really very beautiful...
Our next destination was Wat Sangkat Rattana Khiri which was (you guessed it) a temple on top of a hilltop. There are over 300 steps to the temple - but you can cheat and drive up to the other side (which is a very good idea when it is as hot and humid as it is in November). While Chaiyan was explaining the history of the temple, I was busy being entranced by the thousands of dragonflies which were zooming around us. We eventually wandered through and onto the terrace where we met a man selling lotus seeds. Apparently you can eat them and they look a bit like acorns - so we gave them a bit and all found them to be pretty vile. And then Chaiyan remembered to tell us that you have to peel them first! They are better like this, but still not much to write home about!
The temple complex has several small buildings, but the views are definitely the main attraction. However, it was here that we saw our first Buddha footprint (a big, foot shaped indentation which people line with gold leaf) and had a go at ringing a temple bell (apparently this is for luck - but it is also very good fun because they give you a big stick to hit it with). When we'd seen enough, we carefully made our way down the hundreds of slippery, steep marble steps and back to our bus - which took us down to the river for lunch on a rice barge cruise!
The barge was a wide wooden boat with wooden benches along the side and some tables laid out for our buffet. It had quite an impressive canopy made from woven bamboo (I think) to keep us in the shade and as we drifted along the river filling our faces with lovely Thai curry we were able to take a look at the way people live in rural areas. There were lots of floating houses held up by bunches of fat bamboo canes and people on long canoe type boats out and about harvesting water plants or setting fish traps. We also saw a couple of dredger type boats with huge great nets attached to the front ready to scoop out anything that couldn't get out of the way fast enough! The water in Thailand is very clean (just like everything else really) and we hardly saw a stray piece of litter in it. Fish is very important to the diet too - I think we must have had it in some form or other every day... My favourite bit of our lunch today though was sesame crackers in the shape of flowers accompanied by tiny bananas! Lovely!
We continued our journey to Sukothai after lunch (and after Tessa had recovered from finding a frog in the toilet!) but Chaiyan got distracted again so we stopped to have a look at a paddy field - which was actually quite interesting because I have never seen rice growing and the stems it grows on are really very green. Rice, as you might expect, appears as separate grains along the top half of a long stalk and the stalks are bunched within each plan in groups of maybe 10-12. While were looking at the rice, a van approached along the road making a very loud announcement which I thought might either be 'Stop me and Buy One' or 'Big Sale Now On!'. It was actually advertising a religious festival and a monk was sitting in the back of the van (!) so we popped over to visit his mobile shrine and receive a blessing - which consisted of lighting some incense and having holy water shaken over our heads. All the girls got given little string bracelets and the boys were given little amulets!
We made a stop at the Thawee Folk Museum which was really just a nice place to use the loos and stretch our legs - but it did mean that we could also have a bit of a look at some different sorts of history. We saw a room full of children's toys (things made from wood and bric and brac like toy animals, spinning tops and hobby horses, a room full of things all to do with cooking and life at home (which included brilliant wooden animals with rather vicious metal knives attached to them. These things were coconut scrapers: you sit on the animal and use the knife to get all of the stuff out of the coconut! We saw farming equipment (I liked the wooden machines used to grind rice flour), costumes, old bicycles and, sort of oddly, an aquarium full of all the fish that could be found locally.
Back on the road again and back to the temples! We went to Wat Phra Si Rattana Mahathat which is amazingly decorated! It has beautiful black lacquered columns covered with gold designs and wonderfully carved roof beams. The thing you are meant to look at is the Buddha, which is meant to eb the most beautiful one in the whole country and is very famous and widely imitated because it has a sort of halo of flames all around it. I think perhaps it is quite finely detailed in comparison to some of the others we had seen: the facial features seem more realistic and less stylised and the anatomy, although not very realistic (super long fingers, weird and probably impossible yoga pose) is certainly nicely proportioned (this Buddha has a waist - and shoulders that aren't ridiculously wide...).
After more travelling (it was a long day) we arrived finally at Sukothai Heritage Resort, which is part of a Richard Branson style complex next to a small local airport. Although it was already dark, I instantly adored it. There was a huge central courtyard with an ornamental lake filled with lotus flowers and a mer-elephant fountain. Orchid plants hung from all the walls, quite happily growing away with their bare roots exposed - and there were lizards EVERYWHERE! I saw a big fat frog too, which was brilliant! My room was on the ground floor in a smart part of the hotel: it had it's own little terrace with a sofa on and I could walk straight out to the pool from my patio windows. Lovely - but not something to attempt in the early evening as the sun had already set and the mosquitoes were coming out to play!
Our first destination this morning was the Bang Pa In Summer Palace. I have to be honest. I was expecting something similar to the Grand Palace, just a bit further out (in a Buckingham Palace - Windsor Palace sort of way). It was a bit of a drive from Bangkok but we suddenly turned off the morotrway and started making our way along smaller and smaller roads. Very oddly, although a lot of the land was agricultural, we only really saw crops and not many animals at all. When we arrived at the Palace we made our way into a small (and not terribly grand) entrance hall for a passport check - and then out into what appeared at first just to be gardens.
The Summer Palace actually consists of beautiful gardens, parkland and lakes with ornamental buildings dotted around throughout. We first visited a small shrine then made our way to a recreation of a 'European' bridge (which had a frankly terrible mish-mash of knock-off classical figures and fairies cemented to it but you could see what they had been going for) - and then to a pavilion overlooking a lake where we bought bread and fed it to the fish - and turtles! (There were some real whoppers in there too!) Apparently, it's a Buddhist thing to do...
There was a really lovely ornamental pavilion in the middle of the lake: all gold columns and layered pointy roofs with wiggly gables and a stupa on the top. We couldn't get to it, but it did look wonderful reflected in the water! We saw the summerhouse (more gaudy Classical sculpture) and the Palace (very small and decorated in European and Colonial styles - but with a whopping great throne in the middle of what would have been the main Reception room... We visited a Chinese pagoda decorated in red and gold which was home to the royal offices and climbed an odd sort of lighthouse looking thing (probably a viewing tower) which had the most wonderful marble floors - and we saw brilliant topiary styled to look like a herd of elephants, hippos, snakes and all sorts of other animals!
We made a short journey to our next destination: Wat Phanan Cheong - Quite a big and popular temple complex which at first glance seemed a bit naff and something for the Chinese tourists - but actually home to the Giant Buddha (a huge sitting figure which basically had the building built around it). Weirdly, we arrived at prayer time so lots of people were sitting on the floor with trays full of offerings getting ready to follow a chant - so we had to pick our way through them and get safely to the side: it seemed to be a very popular place! Outside, around the edges of the temple were lots of stalls bulk selling incense sticks and flower garlands and anything else you might need for large scale worship. Interesting place - I would have liked a few more minutes just to take a look around...
We didn't have a lot of time though as we needed to make our way to Wat Yai Chai Mongkol. This was a totally different sort of place. We were now in a UNESCO Heritage Area so the stupa here were in ruins, looking like great bare brick constructions. However, as the temple was still active, they had been wrapped with huge bows of golden fabric. We made our way in and - surprise! - just around the corner we found another enormous stone reclining Buddha swathed in orange fabric from the neck down. But as we looked, someone began to pull the fabric off, and Buddha's golden robes were revealed! We also noticed that the spirit house here (a small shrine on legs which is devoted to the ancestors or gods) was filled with Doraemon!
It was here, at a small shine that Chaiyan showed us how to show devotion. You can light a candle and then incense sticks, give a lotus flower - and also apply a small square of gold leaf to the statue of your choice. Of course, I got a blim burn from the incense and my gold leaf blew away - so the gods were obviously trying to tell me something!
We had one more treat in store before lunch: Chaiyan took us to a rather bleak looking street to see candyfloss being made. Of course we were all expecting a sugar mill and a chap with a stick - possibly doing something clever and making funny shapes like animals or something - but that wasn't what we got! We had seen quite a few stall along the side of the road selling something that I had presumed to be noodles. It was in fact Candy Floss Roti. This stuff looks a bit like the hair from a cheap joke shop wig and is sold wrapped in a small, soft fat crepe type thing. It tastes of the sugariest sugar you could ever imagine. I had one bite and was done - but some of the others really liked it. We had a nice chat to the chaps who were making it in their little shack - they were Muslim and only Muslims make the candy floss: it's a sort of family secret.
If you've ever seen rock being made, it all starts out in the same way. Sugar is heated up until it turns into a big golden blob, then it is slapped onto a slab and hand rolled until it becomes a sort of long fat barley sugar. Then things get a bit odd. Something else (I think it might have been a mix of flour or sugar and water but I'm not sure) is added and this seems to add some sort of impurity to the mix so that as it is stretched out it begins to splinter. Every time it is pulled, more of the mix is sucked in and more of the sugar splinters. It starts to look like straw and then long blonde hair - and then bad wig! We had lots to take away: I think Dan and Tessa ate most of it!
After our lunch, we visited Wat Chiwatthanaram which was just beautiful! Here we begin to get into the Lara Croft/Angkor Wat sort of territory. It was a relatively small site and hand one large central stupa with a square boundary wall and eight sort of gateways surrounding it. Other smaller stupas were planted in the landscape around it. Lots of the Buddha statues here (there are hundreds at every site) were either headless of smashed completely to pieces (something to do with a Burmese invasion). We had a good time exploring this one - climbing up and down staircases, wandering through gateways, looking at weird insects and just enjoying the ruinous nature of the place!
As we arrived at our next site, Wat Phra Si Sanphet, we spotted elephants wandering up the road! (I am not very keen on the idea of people riding on elephants at all - but it was a bit magical to see them just wandering along the pavement with silks all over their backs and huge parasols over the seats on top...) This site was similar to the other - but much larger! There was a row of very large and imposing stupa in the centre (which looked very similar to the one at the Grand Palace, just without all of the gold leaf and adornment) and lots of crumbling walls and columns surrounding them. At this site I was actually allowed (at last) to climb up all of the steps to the 'doorway' of a stupa (you can't go inside because they are filled with bodies and royal treasures and the like so they are all sealed up - but some of them have sort of fake entrances anyway with spaces for statues or shrines in them). We also met some apprentice monks (most young men in the country are encouraged to spend a year in a sort of National Monk Service to learn some religious values) - so they were on some sort of history trip and were all giggling and taking photos on their phones. They posed for a couple of photos, but it was pretty cool just to see them wandering around the site in groups wearing their orange robes.
Just down the road, we took a quick look at Wat Phra Mahathat. It's the same, but not as good as the two we'd just been to: but with one exception - a Buddha's head enveloped in the roots of a Banyan tree! Who needs Angkor Wat now??? I admit, not quite as cool as seeing roots intertwining a whole city, but still not comparable to anything I have ever seen before!
With our travelling done, we checked into the Kantary Hotel, which was probably the biggest hotel in Ayutthaya. The rooms were pretty weird in that they included a whole mini kitchen and were all for smokers (so a little stuffy), but there was an excellent rooftop pool with a hot tub and the hotel cafe specialised in ludicrously enormous cakes and happy hour offers. It did the job.
Day 4 - Travelling to Sukhothai
Our morning began with a trip over the river on a pretty ancient car ferry. We were now quite some distance from Bangkok and a fair way off the routes used by the large coach tours - as evidenced by the other passengers on the car ferry all being local people who were quite surprised to see us and wanted to take photos with us! Chaiyan was taking us a little off the route of the advertised tour to drop in a few of his favourite places - and this included Wat Tha Sung - or the Glass Temple. Again, very obvious as we were the only Western tourists in the place (although there were quite a few Thai families who had popped in to take their own photos)... The glass temple is at first glance unusual for the giant golden statues of kings and other important people who line its threshold. But once you have walked through the gates you see quite a modern building which is quite plain - aside from the beautiful sparkly silver rooftops. Inside there is a HUGE room with a golden Buddha at one end and a golden coffin containing the mummified body of a monk at the other. But in-between are hundreds of thin columns, all of which are covered with mirrored tiles. The entire place sparkles - especially because the floor is polished and the ceiling is mirrored! It's a little disorientating, but really very beautiful...
Our next destination was Wat Sangkat Rattana Khiri which was (you guessed it) a temple on top of a hilltop. There are over 300 steps to the temple - but you can cheat and drive up to the other side (which is a very good idea when it is as hot and humid as it is in November). While Chaiyan was explaining the history of the temple, I was busy being entranced by the thousands of dragonflies which were zooming around us. We eventually wandered through and onto the terrace where we met a man selling lotus seeds. Apparently you can eat them and they look a bit like acorns - so we gave them a bit and all found them to be pretty vile. And then Chaiyan remembered to tell us that you have to peel them first! They are better like this, but still not much to write home about!
The temple complex has several small buildings, but the views are definitely the main attraction. However, it was here that we saw our first Buddha footprint (a big, foot shaped indentation which people line with gold leaf) and had a go at ringing a temple bell (apparently this is for luck - but it is also very good fun because they give you a big stick to hit it with). When we'd seen enough, we carefully made our way down the hundreds of slippery, steep marble steps and back to our bus - which took us down to the river for lunch on a rice barge cruise!
The barge was a wide wooden boat with wooden benches along the side and some tables laid out for our buffet. It had quite an impressive canopy made from woven bamboo (I think) to keep us in the shade and as we drifted along the river filling our faces with lovely Thai curry we were able to take a look at the way people live in rural areas. There were lots of floating houses held up by bunches of fat bamboo canes and people on long canoe type boats out and about harvesting water plants or setting fish traps. We also saw a couple of dredger type boats with huge great nets attached to the front ready to scoop out anything that couldn't get out of the way fast enough! The water in Thailand is very clean (just like everything else really) and we hardly saw a stray piece of litter in it. Fish is very important to the diet too - I think we must have had it in some form or other every day... My favourite bit of our lunch today though was sesame crackers in the shape of flowers accompanied by tiny bananas! Lovely!
We continued our journey to Sukothai after lunch (and after Tessa had recovered from finding a frog in the toilet!) but Chaiyan got distracted again so we stopped to have a look at a paddy field - which was actually quite interesting because I have never seen rice growing and the stems it grows on are really very green. Rice, as you might expect, appears as separate grains along the top half of a long stalk and the stalks are bunched within each plan in groups of maybe 10-12. While were looking at the rice, a van approached along the road making a very loud announcement which I thought might either be 'Stop me and Buy One' or 'Big Sale Now On!'. It was actually advertising a religious festival and a monk was sitting in the back of the van (!) so we popped over to visit his mobile shrine and receive a blessing - which consisted of lighting some incense and having holy water shaken over our heads. All the girls got given little string bracelets and the boys were given little amulets!
We made a stop at the Thawee Folk Museum which was really just a nice place to use the loos and stretch our legs - but it did mean that we could also have a bit of a look at some different sorts of history. We saw a room full of children's toys (things made from wood and bric and brac like toy animals, spinning tops and hobby horses, a room full of things all to do with cooking and life at home (which included brilliant wooden animals with rather vicious metal knives attached to them. These things were coconut scrapers: you sit on the animal and use the knife to get all of the stuff out of the coconut! We saw farming equipment (I liked the wooden machines used to grind rice flour), costumes, old bicycles and, sort of oddly, an aquarium full of all the fish that could be found locally.
Back on the road again and back to the temples! We went to Wat Phra Si Rattana Mahathat which is amazingly decorated! It has beautiful black lacquered columns covered with gold designs and wonderfully carved roof beams. The thing you are meant to look at is the Buddha, which is meant to eb the most beautiful one in the whole country and is very famous and widely imitated because it has a sort of halo of flames all around it. I think perhaps it is quite finely detailed in comparison to some of the others we had seen: the facial features seem more realistic and less stylised and the anatomy, although not very realistic (super long fingers, weird and probably impossible yoga pose) is certainly nicely proportioned (this Buddha has a waist - and shoulders that aren't ridiculously wide...).
After more travelling (it was a long day) we arrived finally at Sukothai Heritage Resort, which is part of a Richard Branson style complex next to a small local airport. Although it was already dark, I instantly adored it. There was a huge central courtyard with an ornamental lake filled with lotus flowers and a mer-elephant fountain. Orchid plants hung from all the walls, quite happily growing away with their bare roots exposed - and there were lizards EVERYWHERE! I saw a big fat frog too, which was brilliant! My room was on the ground floor in a smart part of the hotel: it had it's own little terrace with a sofa on and I could walk straight out to the pool from my patio windows. Lovely - but not something to attempt in the early evening as the sun had already set and the mosquitoes were coming out to play!