Ayutthaya

Today started bright and early with a trip to Ayutthaya (pronounced Eye-YOOT-tee-yah), a town about an hour’s drive north of Bangkok.  Here we will spend one night before moving on to Sukhothai tomorrow.  First up today was a visit to the Summer Palace, so making sure we were all properly attired and in no danger of offending a king that isn’t even in the country at the moment, all 35 of us rolled out and managed to get to the Summer Palace before the crowds and before the intense heat had set in.  Yesterday’s visit to the Grand Palace was hot and crowded and chaotic.  The place was overrun with tour groups - and did I mention that it was hot?  By the end of our stay there, I think most of us were nearing the end of our tethers.  I mean, there’s crowded and there’s hot - then there’s crammed shoulder to shoulder with the masses with everyone jockeying to see and photograph the same thing at the same time while your face melts off, your hair wilts and sticks to your neck and the sweat rolls down your back.  I’ll bet you are all wishing you were here.  I’m so sorry you’re missing all the really big fun.  I know you can’t wait to experience this for yourselves, Don’t run out and book your trips to Thailand all at once now.  

So given yesterday’s experience at the Grand Palace, imagine our surprise to find the Summer Palace grounds to be delightfully tranquil, free of crowds and absolutely beautiful.  We could breathe there.  There was an abundance of greenery and water which helped reduce the effects of the heat and it was just a straight-up nice place to spend a couple of hours.  

Here’s a little bit of background on the Summer Palace:

The Summer Palace was originally. Built in 1632 and was destroyed by the Burmese in 1767 (more on this later).  The site was abandoned and forgotten until King Mongkut, aka King Rama IV, (the king from The King and I) found it and began rebuilding.  The rebuilding continued under his son, King Rama V, the same design master who brought us the Grand Palace of yesterday’s blog post.  Clearly, King Rama V had a penchant for all things European, because with the exception of a single small Thai-style pavilion in the center of the lake and a meeting hall gifted to the Thai people by the Chinese, you would never, ever in a million years think that this palace complex had anything to do with Thailand, Asia or anywhere outside of Europe or Disneyland’s Main Street USA.  It is pretty, just totally unexpected, especially because Thailand has never been colonized so there has never been any European influence here.  I’ll let you see for yourselves.  

The Asian stuff just looks kind of random, doesn’t it, like it was just dropped in here by accident.  

After our brief and unexpected trip to Euro-Disney and a wonderful Thai lunch where we all tried fresh coconut water straight out of coconuts with varying degrees of success. . .

. . . We headed out to tour two sets of temple ruins from when the Burmese attacked Ayutthaya in 1767.  (Sorry I don’t have Jill’s picture.  It’s on her phone, which is locked with Face ID and she‘s asleep and we have to get up at 5:00 a.m. and she’ll kill me if I wake her up.  Her expression is somewhere between mine and my mom’s.)  Evidently, the Burmese knew that Ayutthaya was a prosperous city and they wanted a piece of that prosperity for themselves.  They were convinced that there must be money, gold and jewels in the city, so they sacked it.  Not finding what they were looking for, they concluded that the people and monks of Ayutthaya must have hidden the city’s riches inside the numerous Buddha statues at the city’s two large temples, the thinking being that the Thai people would assume that the Burmese, who at that time were Buddhists, would never desecrate a temple, let alone statues of the Buddha.  This thinking was faulty on two counts:  (1) there were no riches in the city so there was nothing to hide in a temple, a Buddha statue or anywhere else for that matter, and (2) although Buddhists, the Burmese army could have cared less about temples or Buddha statues and were going to do whatever they had to do to find the riches they assumed were hidden from them.  The result: The Burmese army destroyed both temples and beheaded every single Buddha statue they could find, even hacking off arms, legs and torsos in their search for hidden riches.  Finding nothing, they burned everything that could be burnt and left the city and the temples to be overtaken by the jungle.  It wasn’t until 1952, when the Thai people began to redevelop the area of Ayutthaya that the temple ruins were rediscovered and they are now UNESCO world heritage sites.  I have included a photo of a model of how they believe each temple would have looked before it was destroyed, followed by photos of what’s left. 

Temple 1:

 





























One of the lopped-off Buddha heads.  The tree has grown around it.

Temple 2, built in the style of Angkor Wat.  We visited at sunset:

And just because it was so freaky, here are two pictures of the sun as it was going down tonight.  No filters, no Photoshop tricks.  It really looked like this due to the combination of smog and moisture in the air.  Absolutely bizarre how fake it looked.  

So those are the major highlights of Ayutthaya.  Tomorrow we’re off to Sukhothai to see more ruins and a bunch of other stuff that I can’t remember right now because it’s 11:00 at night and I’ve been up since 5:00 and am fading fast.  It’s off to bed for me to catch a few zzzzz’s before getting up 5:00 a.m. again for tomorrow’s adventures.  Fortunately we have many hours on the bus tomorrow to reach our next city, so hopefully I can catch up on a little much-needed rest then.