Ayutthaya

It's so hot.  It's a strange dry heat as well.  I wasn't expecting that to be the case in the middle of Thailand.

I got out of the car and I was hit by the heat of the sun.  It was so intense.  I didn't have any sunglasses, but I had thankfully lathered myself up in sunscreen.

Ayutthaya really isn't a single place.  It's more of a large compound of various ruins and temples, some still operating and some not.  It reminded me a lot of Angkor Wat.  Everything was spread out over quite a large area, so it wasn't possible to be merely dropped off at one location and to walk around.  Instead, there was a need to be ferried around to the different spots.  Some people elected to hire tuk tuks at each stop to take them onto the next, some people (like myself) had drivers or tour buses, some people took elephants!  The craziest people to me were those who decided that the best way to get around would be by bicycle.  On a nice and temperate day, this would indeed be quite a nice way to get around the area.  On a day like this, with the sun blazing down and the dry and hot wind blowing... it seemed like a strange form of torture to inflict on yourself.  I saw various groups of couples and groups of girls all struggling on their bicycles as they dragged themselves from spot to spot.  I'm sure they had read about this in a travel guide and thought it the best way to go.

Each location I ended going to was surprisingly quite different from the other.  I had expected many different locations, but all of relatively similar styles.

Instead, each place I went to seemed to be in varying degrees of ruin.  Some places, were still very much in use.  They had modern sections which housed air conditioned places of worship and they were exceptionally well maintained.  These were clearly still working places of religious worship.  Monks were wandering around and people were buying various pieces of cloth and paper to make their offerings.

Other places felt more like museums.

They weren't too rundown, but they were clearly not being used in any meaningful way anymore

Each building, even if it had fallen into disrepair, was well cared for.  I was surprised by just how well maintained everything was.  There was a small army of caretakers and gardeners, all cleaning and moving and watering the grounds.

The lawns at all of the locations were well cared for and the gardeners clearly took a great deal of pride in their work.  The locals themselves seemed to love this area and at quite a few of the locations, I saw girls who had dressed in traditional Thai attire taking photos and doing little photo shoots.  They all looked beautiful and it reminded me a lot of the girls in Korea and in Japan who dress in traditional clothing before they go to the palaces.

Other places definitely had the "ancient ruin" feel to them.

The famous buddha's head encased by the roots of a tree at Wat Maha That was particularly beautiful.  It demonstrated clearly the power of the forrest as well as the age of these places.  These ruins were the places that reminded me the most of my time at Angkor Wat.  There were far more people than when I went to Angkor Wat back when I was young, but there was a real similarity in the both the way things looked and the way they had slowly crumbled.

Even with all the time it had been since I had been to Angkor Wat, I still couldn't help but feel that this was the lesser of the two.  Give me the choice, and Angkor Wat is definitely the better place to visit.  But I'm not sure if this is a fair comparison.

I am always thankful for the amount of traveling I get to do.  I have fought hard for this ability to see different parts of the world and I've tried to arrange my life in a way that would let me do this.  It does concern me when I go to new places and I don't feel the excitement I once did.  It's a part of growing up.  It's a part of becoming more "worldly".  It's a strange paradox that the more I seek out different parts of the world, the less enthralled I become with what I find.  I can't help but compare what I see with what I have already seen, and this takes away from some of the awe and surprise I would otherwise experience.  I see the people around me, their faces filled with delight with what they are able to see.  I don't always have that anymore.  It's not something you can manufacture.  You go somewhere new and you're either captivated by it, or you're not.  However, I wasn't going to let this stop me.  I wasn't go to stop searching for something amazing to see and I wasn't going to become jaded.  Everything in front of me remained incredible.  Everything I got to see was still a privilege to behold.  I just had to be more appreciative of it all, even if that meant being appreciative in different ways.

Bang Pa-In Palace

So I had hired a car to take me out to the ancient ruins at Ayutthaya.  On the way out to the ruins was Thailand's old royal palace.  Since it was on the way, I thought I might as well stop in for a look.

It was a confusing experience.

Modern Thailand has become an incredible mix of old and new, hyper-modern and crumbling-poverty, Eastern and Western.

It seems as though this phenomenon wasn't such a recent thing.

The palace grounds were a mismatched collection of buildings from different eras and styles.  There were traditional Thai style pagodas, Chinese style palaces, continental European style buildings and bridges, some very English looking houses...

It did feel a little bit amusement park like.

The buildings on an individual level were all beautiful and quite unique.  When you were up close to them or looking at them in isolation, you could see the care and effort that had been placed into their construction.

All together in one single spot, it was far more confusing.

I tried to look at it all from a different perspective.  Rather than considering all of these buildings as a strange mash up of different styles, it was probably better to look at it from the wider context of Thai history.

Thailand was one of the few countries in the world that was able to escape the reach of European colonisation.  Throughout the late 1700s through to the 20th century, Thailand was able to remain proudly free of foreign takeover and was even able to secure its borders as an independent country.

This collection of buildings was probably best seen as a monument to that success.  Foreign powers came and went, but rather than take over, they effectively gifted these buildings to Thailand, either directly or through some form of cultural exchange.  It may still look strange without the context, but for Thai people it should probably be viewed with an enormous sense of pride in their country.

Developing like crazy

My friend Todd and I had gone searching for street food. We had walked to the street food markets at Lumphini Park only to discover that they were gone.  It seems like many of the famous street food eateries in Bangkok were slowly disappearing.  Bangkok was changing and losing some of what it used to be.  Given our search for street food, it was odd then that we ended up at a roof bar in an upscale hotel in the very expensive Lumphini district.

Looking out at the view of Bangkok's skyline, we were both amazed.  The pace of Bangkok's development is a thing to behold.  All around the city, there were skyscrapers and developments that wouldn't have been around when I first visited Bangkok in 2003.  In only 17 years, a new city had grown in Bangkok and largely engulfed what I once knew.  I think about my friends who used to live here.  I don't think they would recognise this place at all.  They hold fond memories of this city and I wonder whether they would still love Bangkok now that it seems to be becoming another version of Singapore.

Even being in this roof bar itself seemed to be incredible.  It was a speakeasy style bar which had another separate speakeasy hidden inside of it.  The second bar was far cooler than the first and made an otherwise standard bar something worth coming back to.  The drinks on offer were an assortment of the standard cocktail bar drinks along with some more unique creations.  I ordered a Manhattan and a Sazerac, and both were what I would class as being "OK" at best.  The bartenders needed a touch more experience with the drink mixing and a better understanding of how the elements came together.  One annoying thing was that they overmixed the drinks with ice which led to them being slightly too watered down.  Now, I don't normally critique such things so much, but for me it was just another element in the development of this city.  It now had the incredibly cool and sophisticated cocktail bars, it had the views, it had the clientele.  It was probably just a few short years away from further developing the culture that would completely provide for it all.

More likely than not, all of this will be changed again the next time I arrive.

Floating markets

I had seen pictures and shows about Bangkok's floating markets for years.  It is a mainstay of travel shows to Thailand and is often portrayed as one of the "must see" places to visit.

I had wanted to go and visit for quite a while, but I'd never had enough time to go.  The markets really aren't in Bangkok, they're actually a couple of hours drive outside of the city, so the trip there takes a bit of planning.  Since I was hanging out with my friend Todd for the weekend, we decided to hire a driver to take us out there.  The driver arrived nice and early and we hit the road.  It wasn't long before we hit traffic.  It was what I would consider to be a mild annoyance at worst and seemed to largely be caused by the vast highway construction works which were underway.  It probably wouldn't be long before this trip time would be cut in half.

There were two floating markets I wanted to go and see, Damnoen and Amphawa.

We were taken to Damnoen first.  Once we got there, we hired a boat and we were taken into the canals and the market itself.

This market was absolutely a tourist trap.  No doubt about it in my mind!  I had read that there were locals that shopped here, but I didn't notice any at all.  Instead, all I saw were other tourists like myself floating past and taking photos.  We were immediately put on notice as well when our driver urged us "not to buy anything".  His advice was wise, as we were immediately confronted with overpriced food and the type of tourist trinkets that no one ever seems to buy. 

Yet even with the tourist trap nature of the place, it was really quite beautiful.  It was lovely to be floating down the canals past the little shops and the houses of the locals.  Even if the places we were being taken were very touristy, the area as a whole was definitely still being lived in by locals and it was a unique experience to experience (in a brief way) the lives they lived and the calm surroundings of their homes.

After about an hour of floating around the markets, we made it back to where we started and our driver took us to Amphawa markets.

Our driver told us to get food here.  He said that this was an actual market, not a tourist market.  Now, there were PLENTY of tourists, but we quickly understood what he meant as it was clear that this was a working market where people did their daily shopping.  It was nice to see the combination of the locals and tourists all walking around together.

Amphawan was quite a bit bigger than Damnoen, but it wasn't as unique or pretty to look at.  We decided against the boat tour in Amphawan and that was probably for the best.  It was easy to walk around and much of the experience was from being closer to the shops and restaurants which you could walk past.  We sat in one of the restaurants eating seafood and watched as the boats floated by.  It was a nice place to sit and to decompress.  Not long before we left, we also saw an enormous monitor lizard calmly swimming around in one of the canals... sadly neither of us was fast enough with our cameras.  We had both noted that the area in Amphawan felt pretty clean and tidy.  With monitor lizards that size in the area, I doubt there would be too many vermin around to cause much trouble.

I was very glad that I had been able to visit these floating markets.  I was reminded of the canals of Zhujiajiao outside of Shanghai.  It's not always fair to compare different places, but it's hard to avoid at times.  Whereas the Thai floating markets receive global attention, Zhujiajiao is relatively unknown outside of China.  It's a shame because when I compare the two, I definitely feel that Zhujiajiao has a lot more to offer in terms of both the visual beauty and the specific shops and sights to see.  It's not to say that these markets weren't great to visit though.  They offer something very different to the intense bustle of Bangkok.

Return to Bangkok

I hadn't been to Bangkok since back in 2002 (I think it was back then).  It had been a very long time since I had stepped foot in this city.  My memories were of a crazy place.  It was dirty, disorganised and crowded with people.  It was not a pretty city at all, and it felt in every way a enormous sprawling third world city.  Everywhere we went, there was poverty and a desperate need for infrastructure investment.

However, even then, there were small shoots of change.  When we were there, the first line of the new mass transit railway had just opened.  I remember going for a ride on it with my friends who lived in Thailand.  They mentioned that not many people rode it yet because of its cost, but it was a gleaming new example of some of the changes that seemed to be coming.  Still, for us it was nothing more than a novelty as we soon jumped back onto the trusty old tuktuks to get to where we needed to.

This trip showed something very different.  The Bangkok I remembered had been consigned the pages of history.  In its place was a city developing fast.

There was modern buildings everywhere, the mass transit system had been developed further.  The entire city just felt cleaner and more organised as well.  The streets were no longer strewn with rubbish, but instead, it felt like this was a city that was on the cusp of joining the ranks of the global modern metropolises.  Even something as simple as the tuktuks weren't what I remembered.  There were now taxis everywhere, modern taxis which actually put the taxis in Hong Kong to shame in terms of their comfort and make.  Everyone seemed to be using these taxis as their day to day transport instead of the tuktuks.  When we went to catch a tuktuk, I was shocked that the prices were higher than the taxis and there was a general refusal to negotiate the prices much at all.  The tuktuks weren't a integral part of the transport system anymore, and were now clearly something reserved for tourists looking for an "authentic experience". 

Island hopping

I couldn't stop thinking back to my Thailand trips when I was younger and with my family.  I like to think that I'm still young, but there was definitely a feeling to those trips.  Those were the tail end of the "family trips", where I was still effectively a child following my parents and their directions.  Now, I was in a very different position, dictating my own way and making my own decisions.

I booked a day trip out to the islands with Renee.  We were taken out on one of the large tour boats that I remembered from when I was younger.

One of the first stops was at an island which had a small hike to reach a peak with stunning views of the whole group of islands.  Most people seemed to have been a touch more prepared than me with hiking shoes and sneakers, but for me, the thongs/flip flops would have to suffice.  I managed to climb up to the top of the peak, even over the jagged rocks and the views were worth the climb.  Shoes may have been the better option to climb with though.

The trip around all the islands and the various beaches was what you would expect when visiting such an idyllic paradise.  The waters were clear, the beaches were soft and the sun was warm.

The day was spent moving from island to island, and each place we stopped to admire our surroundings and to just enjoy being there.

Having experienced trips like this before, I didn't have the same level of wonder and amazement that Renee seemed to have.  This was her first time in South East Asia, and it's easy to forget how much of a paradise everything can appear when you first arrive.

When arriving at each of the little islands with their secluded beaches, the scenes are always like something out of a movie.  Each one of these places is its own perfect little wonder, completely cut off from any of the troubles of the outside world.

At one of the beaches, we were given the opportunity to paddle around and to the shore from the boats.  As we slowly paddled and looked up, we could see just how sharply each of the islands jutted out from the sea.  They created a shadow which you slowly moved into and which changed the whole scene from one of brightness to one with far more intimacy.  It all of which just seemed to add to the feeling that we really were truly far from the intensity and rush of modern city life. 

Koh Samui

It had been a very long time since I had been to Thailand.  The last trip was probably to Krabi or Phuket with my family.  Time really does skip along faster than you'd expect.

For my first trip in many years, I found myself in Koh Samui.  This island has a reputation as a tropical paradise, so I was keep to see if this was all true.  I hadn't really thought about Koh Samui as a destination, but Renee was very keen.  She had heard amazing things about this place and she had her heart completely set on visiting.  I was eventually swayed and booked the tickets for us to go.  We had a quick stopover in Bangkok and then we were off to the island.  The car ride that took us to the resort was like many of the trips I've been on in the past, winding through small villages, through derelict areas and past lush, dense forests.  So far, there was nothing about this place that seemed particularly unique by the standards of South East Asia.

We arrived at the resort, after the circuitous car ride.  We had visited various other resorts where other vacationers were staying and we were lucky last.  We entered into the old colonial style building which had been renovated into this new resort.  It had that lovely combination of white walls and dark wooden features which seem to match up so well with this tropical climate.  I felt immediately more relaxed as I walked through the halls.  The girl behind the reception welcomed us as we checked in.  She smiled and said that it was very loud in the hotel because of some of the guests (she glanced towards what I assumed was a large tour group) and so she was giving us an upgrade!  We found ourselves in an enormous suite that was far larger than my apartment in Hong Kong.  The sitting room of the suite was probably bigger than my apartment.  We unpacked and then headed out to the beach.

I started to understand more why people loved it here.  It was a paradise.  The waters were clear and the beach was empty.  We had this lovely spot largely to ourselves as most people seemed to instead congregate next to the pool.  I couldn't completely understand this.  Why go to a generic resort pool when you could sit next to this natural wonder?