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We _did_ manage to get out of the city a little. Well, actually, my travelling companions ventured further afield than I did - I was too busy exploring Bangkok and enjoying the time to myself. Still, the days spent outside the city were very valuable. It was less polluted there, less western, less tourist-infested, and so beautiful, ohmygod, just like I had hoped it could be. By this point, we had also learned that the Bangkok bus system was really quite easy to use, and dirt cheap, so we didn't have to rely on the vastly overpriced taxi service as we had been. (This was definitely a good thing - we had already had a couple run-ins with taxis, one where the cabbie refused to turn on the meter, tried to charge us gobs of money to go a few blocks, and then refused to let us out of the cab when we decided we didn't want him to drive us, and another where my travelling companions opened the cab door and caused a minor traffic accident. (I didn't witness this one, but apparently it was a pretty bad scene.) In any case, travel became much friendlier when we started taking the bus instead.) My first excursion away from the city was to an open-air museum called "The Ancient City" which was vastly more wonderful than I had expected. (Although perhaps not "one of the wonders of the world" as they claim.) They had very large scale-models of important sites from all over Thailand, some no longer standing, as well as beautiful replicas of sculpture, and a lovely little mock village selling trinkets. (I personally developed a small collection of gorgeous Thai puppets.) Our other major excursion was to the ancient capitol of Thailand, Ayuthaya. We hired a driver to guide us through the city, and he took us to six or seven amazing sites, ruined temples - gigantic gold-covered buddahs, enormous stupas. This was what I had _really_ wanted to see - a far cry from my dream of one day visiting Angkor Wat in Cambodia, but close enough to fulfill my longing for OLD, and to gain that feeling of being someplace real. I loved it here, though after six or seven temples, it was definitely time to head back.
As we drove around Ayuthaya, we were followed by these elephants. |