Thailand Day 3 Ayutthaya

Sunday May 8^th

Happy Mother's Day to my mom, and to all you other mothers out there!! Have a good one.

I was up very early this morning to take one of the tours I booked yesterday. I was picked up at the hotel by 6:45 by a full van and we drove for a half hour to the company headquarters where a bunch of other vans pulled up and we did a sort out, as they made sure the right people were in the right vans for the trip they booked. It looked quite complicated but organized.

We drove for about an hour out of the city to the historical Ayutthaya area. This used to be the original capital of Thailand, then known as Siam. We visited four or five temples that are mostly in ruins. The area was attacked and destroyed by the Burmans two hundred years ago. Many of the temples have the bodies of the Buddha statues but the heads have been cut off and taken back to Burma, as they thought they were full of gold. The Burmans sacked and burned the temples, and they have been left as ruins. We saw a very large reclining Buddha and a head of another Buddha that had been removed and a tree's roots had grown all around it, so now it can't be moved. As we continued to walk around the area, it started to rain, which was good, as it cooled it off (it had been about 34 and humid) and felt quite good.

We stopped for lunch and it continued to rain while we ate. When it finally let up we walked to a reconstructed building that housed a very large sitting Buddha and then across a field to see an elephant camp. Here people could take elephant rides, while other elephants performed tricks by sitting or playing with hoola hoops.

After that we did some more reorganizing of people, some who left to do other things or tours, and the rest of us drove another hour to the Bang Pa-In Palace, which is the Summer Palace of the royal family. It is a large complex that is still used today for some functions. It is beautifully landscaped and has many attractive building including a residence of the king and his wife and separate ones for each of his other wives. There is also a large building that was built by and paid for by the Chinese, and a beautiful tower. I was teamed up with a Chinese woman named Carmen as we drove around the grounds in a golf cart... this is the first vehicle I've driven since I left Canada nine months ago! We spotted a number of large water monitors on the edge of the waterways that are in the complex. They look like small versions of the Komodo Dragon, very cool.

Then we loaded up in the van again for the drive back to Bangkok. I arrived back at the hotel by 6:00, had a swim and dinner and then typed and got ready for an early bed, as I have another tour tomorrow.