Wat a day

Saturday 2nd February

The move to Rambuttri was supposed to be for a quieter sleep. And although the road is a lot quieter, a bloody cockeral (or to be honest about 10 of them) seem to live across the road. So you get woken up at dawn whether you want it or not.

Anyway today I did want it, because it was the day trip to Ayutthaya (or something like that, place name translation spelling is a variable concept over here - although us Irish can't complain as we have our own problems to worry tourists - Dingle anyone).

The trip didn't look like it was going to get off to a great start as there was a typically Thai amount of confusion at the start trying to sort out who goes where. But to be honest this was as much the fault of foreigners who thought they could book a trip for one day and turn up on another, or not have a trip booked at all. But then again the Thai seem to have this idea for maximising revenue, so they have no problem in altering our paid for plans so they can get another few hundred baht. We got dealyed by about 40 minutes or so, but it didn't really affect us in the long run.

The upshot of the problem was that they wanted to ensure the minibus for the tour was as full as possible. This meant that I had to squash into the front seat with the lovely Christiane from Austria, who I hope wasn't too inconvenienced by the whole experience. It was a bit disconcerting as we were in the front without seat belts, never a good idea, but the driver did seem to be taking care not to break the speed limits.

The trip itself turned out to be very well organised (again a pleasent surprise as I expected it to not work). In fact so much so I'll recommend Mama Tours to anyone who wants to do this trip from Khao San. The trip involved visiting the old ancient palace of Ayutthaya, the former capital of Thailand, and a number of Wats. All of these lie within a World Heritage site. Most of it was destroyed in a war with Burma and all were of a totally different style to the more modern Wats in Bangkok. What surprised me is that they were all built of brick, and if you zoomed right in on the bricks and ignored the overall design, the ruins could have been of something from 18th century England.

The only problem with the tour is that Ayutthaya has 100s of great places to visit (its actually quite big) and we only got to do 5. Although Christiane and I did visit one extra one that looked more interesting than one on the tour. But what can the organisers do when you are on limited time. The trip could have been slightly better organised in terms of ensuring that people knew the schedule and turned up at the meeting points on time, but overall it was a good trip.

After we got back, in a lot more comfort as a few one way trippers meant that we were in more comfortable seats. One thing I cannot fault is the roads in Thailand, far better than our own.

In the evening I went to watch some sport. I had planned to watch some rugby, but by the sounds of it I was probably better off watching the soccer. I watched Spurs v ManU in the company of two Spurs supporters from Minnesota, Ben and Paul (yes Ryan, I am serious). We couldn't decide which was more unusual, Spurs fans from St Paul, or a Twins fan from Ireland (although I later confessed I'm really a Yankees fan). I refused to celebrate a 1-1 draw with Spurs, especially as Spurs were the better team.