Day 2 (Part 2) - Wats Of Ayutthaya And Dirty White Men Of Bangkok

We arrived at the Ayutthaya train station and made our way into the waiting area to collect our thoughts and look at the map. The guidebook we were using, the Fodor's See It line - not recommended at all, great pictures but short on practical information and decent maps - said that Ayutthaya was a walkable town, but that it was suggested to hire a tuk-tuk to see all the major sights. Since we were only planning on seeing a couple of the wats we figured we would do it on foot. Still trying to avoid the tuk-tuk scene at this point. So we turned down the woman at the station who was offering to take us around, along with half dozen other tuk-tuk drivers who kept offering us rides on between the station and the street, and made our way down the road toward town.

Ayutthaya's train station is on the opposite side of a river from the main part of town and where all the stuff a tourist wants to see is located. We would soon discover that it was quite a bit further than it looked on the Fodor's map. We stopped for refreshment at one of Thailand's many thousand 7-11s. For those of you wondering, and I know you are, yes the 7-11s in Thailand have the hot dog rollers/warmers and the chili/cheese sauce pumps.

Like any suburban area, the roads in Ayutthaya are pretty wide and straight and not always very pedestrian friendly. Just finding the stairs to get up to the sidewalk on the bridge took us a good ten minutes. It was hidden around a corner under the bridge and no sidewalk led to it. We crossed the bridge, hung a right and I thought we were just around the corner from where we were heading. But we walked and walked, yet didn't seem to be getting anywhere. The part of town we were in looked mostly like any nondescript, run down American suburb. We could have just as easily been in Jersey City as Thailand.

I kept having to check the map to see if we were still going the right direction, which of course made tuk-tuk drivers stop to try to get us to jump in. It was hot and sunny, but Lisa and I tend to try to walk places when we travel so we kept turning them down. What took us over an hour to do could have been done in about ten minutes, so there are drawbacks. But hey, we weren't on a schedule.

We'd been in this situation before. When we went to Rome several years ago every guidebook said don't try to walk down the Appian Way to The Catacombs as the road is long, busy and lacking sidewalks. We did it anyway. Not only did the road lack sidewalks and shoulders most of the way, but it is bordered by a wall. So every time a group of cars came speeding down the road we stood up against the wall until they passed.

For some reason this was seeming more arduous than that. Maybe because we were older or that it was hotter than Rome. It could have been because in Rome there was stuff to stop and look at and take pictures of along the way instead of feeling like we were in Newark.

But finally we were able to spot one of the towers of Wat Phra Mahathat and just walked towards it without having to keep looking for street names.

When we got to the main intersection by the Wats there was a huge herd of cattle making their way down the street.

We had seen in our guidebook that the Wats were free to enter, but when we walked in the entrance a woman at a little hut kept yelling at us to buy a ticket. We kind of ignored her and she came in after us and said we needed to pay. Having been in places before (like Egypt) where their is a lot of conning of tourists with fake ticket takers or "security" at tomb entrances, we tried to hold our ground and insist that we didn't have to pay because it was free. We started to wonder though, and I went and checked out the hut outside and it appeared to be on the up and up.

So instead keeping ourselves from getting ripped off like a couple of stupid tourists, we pretty much just came across like a couple of ass-hole Americans. George W. Bush would have been so proud.

We checked out the two wats for a while, which included seeing a Buddha statue ruin which had been taken over by a tree and the roots grew around its head.


And a stray dog climbing all over the ruins.



We then decided to go back to the station to get the train back to Bangkok. No way were we going to walk again. We hired a tuk-tuk (though Lisa found out later it was something called a Songthaew and not technically a tuk-tuk) to get us back.

Train ride back took longer as the train kept having to stop for long periods for some reason. It was also a heck of a lot more crowded than on the way there. I also noticed that mnay people on the train had big bags of rice with them. We're talking about bags that looked like 20 to 50 pounds each. I never did figure it out, but many people were met at the Bangkok station by family members to help them with the bags. There must be a place north of Ayutthaya that sells rice so cheap that it makes it worth the trip.

After getting back to Bangkok it was too late to go up to May Kaidee's to eat again, like I wanted to, because we wouldn't be able to catch the boat back. So we decided to go an Indian restaurant we saw in the Sukhumvit area by the hotel that we saw on the way to the subway earlier that day.

After a fine Indian meal at a place called Namuskaar we strolled up Sukhumvit toward the hotel. That was when we finally saw the sex tourism industry right out in the open.

As we were walking up the street I suddenly realized that there were women around dressed a heck of a lot skimpier than any Thai women we had seen out and about at all. There was definitely a "hooker dress" look to many girls' ensembles. I actually saw short-shorts on a girl, who also happened to be basically on top of a guy up against a wall. And they were all hanging out with older white guys. There was no discretion at all. Guys were walking down the street holding hands with girls that were obviously "in the business" on the way back to hotels.

Then, as we got to the corner of the lane our hotel was on, I noticed a place called, if memory serves, The Champagne Club. I hadn't noticed this sign before even though we had walked by there so many times. I realized that was because it wasn't open and the sign wasn't turned on during the day. Inside the door, in a foyer next to some stairs, were two chairs with two very scantily-clad young girls sitting there. It was pretty damn obvious what that place was all about.

"Holy crap," I thought, "No wonder our hotel is so crazy about the whole 'no sex tourists' thing, it's right around the corner from us."

Now that we had finally seen it with our own eyes, we wouldn't be able to stop noticing it the rest of the time we were in Bangkok.


Next - Chatachak Market, Chinatown and falling victim to our first scam