Ayuthya

Ayuthya was the capital of Thailand from 1300 odd for 400 years until it was sacked by the Burmese. It is at a confluence of rivers and the main town in on an island, with many old ruins of places and temples. The bus from Chiang Mai dropped us off at the motorway sliproad at 330am, rather than take us direct to the town or bus station. We did all manage to squeeze into the one Tuk-tuk around but of course the guest houses were shut. One kindly let people sleep in the restaurant, so I made to with a hammock ( a bit exposed to insects). The next day I hired a bike and set off fairly early to see the ruins. It was baking, but I saw quite a lot, and they were different than what I'd seen before, but not so different from each other after a while. They were quite ruined with towers and stupas sloping at angles. What was quite impressive was the scale and number of ruins. I also saw a coupleof museums before returning to the guesthouse mid afternoon where I ended up trying to sleep in a pool of sweat, nice.

In the evening I'd booked on a 'night tour', a small group consisting of an american girl (much rarer than Canadians out here) and an older Canadian-Fijian-Indian gentleman, who was generous to all but the Canadian homeless and bought us a beer. The first stop was the old elephant krall, where I didn't expect any new elephants, but indeed there were some, and we got to plan with a baby one! (usually anything with elephants involved costs big bucks). Then it was on to a big stupa you could climb to see the sunset, before viewing a recling Buddha, and many of the ruins I'd seen during the day illuminated for the night.