A mistimed trip to Ayutthaya

This day (5th December) last year I went to Ayutthaya, near Bangkok in Thailand. It wasn’t meant to be that way. When we booked a vacation in Bangkok between the 4th and 8th of December, the assumption was that we would go to Ayutthaya, the “Ayodhya of Thailand” on the 6th of December. And for sheer troll value, I would pose in front of one of the temples there giving the RSS salute and upload it on social media. Just for kicks.

But then it didn’t happen that way. On the 5th of December last year, we reached the “victory monument” in Bangkok from where private minibuses are available to nearby locations. Our plan for the day was to go to Kanchanaburi, where we could see the Bridge on the River Kwai and the related museum. But then we reached the Victory Monument at a time when the previous bus to Kanchanaburi had just left and the next one wouldn’t leave for another 45 minutes. The bus to Ayutthaya was going to leave in another 10 minutes and we gladly hopped on!

We got dropped off somewhere in the middle of Ayutthaya town and we seemed to be the only tourists on the minibus. There wasn’t much of a choice for us in terms of tuk-tuks to take us sightseeing, and we tried to strike a bargain with the one tuk-tuk that was there where the bus dropped us. I remember it being a particularly hot day (it was December but Bangkok is close to the tropics). The tuk-tuk driver knew no English. Instead he had a laminated sheet of A4 paper on which pictures of monuments had been printed. He pointed us to some three or four of these and said he would take us there. We settled at THB 150 per hour (if I’m not wrong).

And you read that right – we engaged the tuk-tuk by the hour. In a place like Ayutthaya, where there is little traffic, roads are good and you can go as fast as the tuk-tuk takes you; and where the monuments are all located close enough to each other that distance is not too much, the biggest cost for the driver of the tuk-tuk is his time. Thus, hourly engagement means that tourists are likely to hurry up and not take too much time in seeing the monuments. And this results in faster “turnover” for the driver and he can hope to take around more batches of tourists each day. And considering that he spoke no English, there was little “guide role” that he could play.

As we got on to the back of the tuk-tuk, we saw a woman and baby climb into the front with the driver – he was bringing along his entire family to take us around! So at each monument we would get off and take a look around and they would just hang around the tuk-tuk. As soon as we returned, the three of them would squeeze into the front of the tuktuk and we would get into the back (this tuktuk was like a Piaggio Ape), and off we would go! Each time we reached a monument, the driver’s wife would hold up that printed sheet of A4 paper and point us to a picture which corresponded to the monument!

The monuments were themselves nothing too special to write about – especially since we had spent the earlier three days at Siem Reap. But the overall process itself was interesting. Some monuments were really crowded, though, for it was also King Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX)’s birthday, and people had got together in all places that seemed marginally religious to celebrate his birthday. Monuments attached to such places were crowded. Others had no people at all.

I remember spending three hours seeing all of Ayutthaya thus. We then went to a restaurant close to the bus stand. I remember the football fan in me facing a dilemma as to what beer to drink. Obviously there was no Carlsberg available there, and Chang was out thanks to it being Everton’s sponsor. I settled for the other Thai beer Singha. It was only later I was to find that Singha was Chelsea’s official beer!

Later that evening we went out for dinner and got caught in a monumental traffic jam thanks to the King’s birthday celebrations. We got off the tuk-tuk and started walking, using the maps on my dying phone to find out the directions. My sense of direction held good, but sense of sight didn’t as I hit myself quite badly against a parked car, badly injuring my shin as I later found out. And later in the night we had trouble finding transport back to the hotel. Now that Uber has started operations in Bangkok, next time it shouldn’t be as hard!

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