year less a day: Day 7 & 8 - Sun/Mon Nov 9/10

We catch a northbound bus from Bangkok to work our way up to Chiang Mai. The Bangkok to Chiang Mai route is about 12 or more hours if you do it in one shot, so we've decided to work our way up slowly. Our first stop is Ayutthaya (a-YOOT-tie-UH). The city used to be the royal capital until about 250 years ago and then it was sacked and looted by the Burmese army and all sorts of treasures were carted off. There are lots of ruined and headless Buddhas around the place:

The historic bits are quite extensive and well tended - well enough to get a UNESCO World Heritage site designation. There is a Fine Arts Department in Thailand that seems to have had a hand in restoring all of hte temple ruins that we see in Ayutthaya (and later in Sukhothai to the north).

The temples and buildings are now exposed red brick, sometimes held together with cement. The grounds are neat and tidy and (something which really impresses Western Me) there is no grafitti anywhere on them, even through many of the ruins are not guarded at night (though the ones we took picture of are).

It is in Ayutthaya that we (re-)realize that Lonely Planet scale guides, though accurate in central areas of town, are sometimes less accurate outside of the center of interest, and are occasionally very lacking in additional reference details (ie. alternate streets you might wander down). Lots and lots and lots of walking on Day 8 while we work our way to one of the sites, Wattanaram.

In Wat Ratburana, in the center of town, there was a lovely painted tomb that we weren't expecting to find:

And here's the outside:

At Wat Phra Mahathat there is a Buddha head that has grown into one of the Bodhi trees - one theory is that a thief found it too heavy to cart away and dumped it off, maybe buried it, and the tree lifted it up and grew around it:

People make offerings to Buddha at the tree:

And again at Wat Chai Wattanaram there were lots of ruins:

And then we finished off the evening with Wat Phra Si Sanphet:

Our lodgings were at the lovely Baan Lotus guesthouse (here's the view from our room):