Well, I had writted this post about all we did up to today (don't worry, nothing much has happened), but weebly coughed and loggde me out, deleting what I wrote. So, here's the short version:
We're in Krabi town. Probably tomorrow we'll go to the beach and relax for a week. After that, we'll take two days in a very nice hotel The Hammonds got for us (Thanks!) Phuket isn't so good.
WEll, one thing we thought would be fun to see was the floating market. After a little research we found that the largest one is in Damneon Saduak, an hour-and-a-half West of Bangkok. Leaving Ayutthaya took us through Bangkok, but we really didn't want to spend another night there after five days, so we transfered through the train station and took a bus to the closest town. We figured that we would spend the night, get up early, and see the place an hour before any Bangkok tourists got there. (I read a blog by one woman who did the same and raved about how nice it was) Our hotel set it up for us at a decent price and we set to leave at 7AM, which sounded great to us. We surely got there earlier than the Bangkok tourists, but we forgot the rule of money in S.E. Asia, namely tourists = money. No tourists before 8:30 AM means that no one will buy stuff at outrageously inflated prices, so most people would rather not wake up ridiculously early and make more money. The first hour was boring. We went down some canals surrounded by closed shops, saw a sprinkling of people selling fruit in boats, but basically just were taken to the tourists shops that opened for the few tourists who decide to beat the rush. When we asked the driver why it was so dull, he said that the market doesn't get going until 10 or so. When we asked him why he then took us at 7 AM, he said there were too many tourists. Of course, 7AM means that he can take us and still get back in time to get back to the pier before the tourist rush, charging full price for both trips. Around 8 we turned back to go through the canal again, and this time a couple more boats had appreared, so it was a little more interesting. Once we reached the main causeway the boatman offered to drop us off so we could wait around until 10 to see the market then walk back, but we were not in the mood for it. The tourists mean that the boats we want to see come, buyt it also means that a good %60 of all shops are just selling the same souvenir crap that we can find anywhere else for a lot more than we can find anywhere else. Besides, we wanted to start heading South. We went back to our hotel to tell him that the boat ride was really boring and ask why he set the time for 7 Am. He said that is was because there were less tourists there, but we told him that there were also no boats then. It was like trying to see a firwork show through binoculars: we got the basic idea, but had to fill in a lot of details in our mind when the whole idea is to see the whole thing as one big picture. We told him to start taking people at 8, but that wasn't going to ahppen since it would give drivers only one group in a day instead of two. We shrugged, said okay, and got on a bus to Ratchaburi. It took us to the freeway, then the lady told us to take bus 681 to Ratchburi. Luckily the bus taking the Ratchaburi-Kanchanaburi route was right behind our bus, so we hopped on, checked that the bus was going to Ratchaburi and settled down. After fifteen minutes we we didn't take any turns for Ratchaburi but all the turns for Katchanaburi we got nervous, wrote the names down in our book and doubled-checked with the ticket guy that we were indeed going to the right place. Pointing to the bus then Katchanaburi got no response, but he nodded when we pointed to Ratchaburi. Imagine how we laughed when we got off at the last stop, Katchanaburi, two hours North of where we wanted to go. I found the bus and asked the driver what he was thinking and only then did he understand that we wanted to go to the exact opposite of the route he drives. He laughed, said sorry and made a gesture that looked like "My assistant is kind of dumb, you know." Yeah, we know. We have lots of time and no other choice but to take the bus South, so laughing at our luck we boarded a bus and spent 1.5 hours driving apst all the secenery we just drove past. We finally got to Ratchaburi, checked how hard it would be to take a bus, eventually said "fuck this, let's take a train" and are currently waiting for our train to come in at a great interent cafe. The internet cafe gave us time to upload pictures and check mails. So, pictures should be up as far as Ayutthaya on flickr and we'll have so much time to update in Phuket and Krabi that we should be more regul
Puppied up and ready for Ayutthaya (especially Shiz, her three Things to See were Angkor Wat, Sukhothai, and Ayutthaya). The train dropped us off at the station (oddly enough) and we found our hotel for cheap close to the station. This hotel was another one with a very interesting owner. He was drunk when we got there. He is a very friendly guy, but one of those guys that you wonder where they go when the bar closes. lucky for him his front porch was a bar, so he didn't have to go far. After thirty minutes it felt like he amused himself more than anyone else, but he was good fun to joke around with. With place to stay settled, we headed to Ayutthaya the next morning only to find...puppies. How happy were we? Very. These were look-but-don't-touch puppies and their mother made sure of that by growling at people who came too close. Sadly for her she chose to feed her pups next to a staircase, so every tourist stopped and stared. Ayutthaya impressed us a lot, but after Angkor Wat and Sukhothai, we found it easy to get ruined-out with our third large S.E. Asian ruin complex in a month-and-a-half. Yeah, I feel your sympathy (sarcasm is really hard across the internet, eh?) But we refused to let our experiences with Sukhothai or Angkor Wat ruin Ayutthaya.
But see? Ayutthaya is a beautiful place. We took two days to explore that place, but if we had rented bicycles we could have done it in a day. We're not pressed for time, so two days was a great pace for us. It allowed us to walk one day and see ruins, then take a second day for biking and checking out the city itself. If you're interested in more pictures from here, our flickr album contains lots of them.
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We didn't have much else to do in Bangkok, save get our Indian visa on Friday. We spent Thursday going to one last place: the Dawn Pagoda. We took a boat across the river to this nice little temple. Honestly, we were getting a little templed out, they do seem a bit the same after a while. At The Dawn Temple we could climb most of the way up, though, which gave us a good view of the city.
We descended pretty satisfied and ready to go home, but the temple had one more thing for us to see, though we didn't know it. After this, though, we realized that all temples should come with this one thing.....
Puppies! Yes, lounging on the lawn around this temple were puppies. It was great. They slept while we petted them and lay around with them. It was great. Seriously, all temples should come with puppies. The next day we took the morning to get innocuated for yellow fever and meningitis since we wil go to Kenya and Ethiopia. The Red Cross Society in Bangkok gives great, cheap vaccines with wonderful people. After that, we had six hours to kill before we could pick up our visas, so we sat down at a restuarant across from the visa center and played some gin. Once four o'clock came we got our visas and took a train to Ayut
The inside of the most important wall in the Royal Palace is lined with pictures tellinga the story of Rama I. Artists continually restore the work, so the paintings stay in prime condition. Here are some pictures from the wall;
I was going to put up pictures this time, I swear. I plugged the card reader into the computer and a virus scanning software came up, so pulled ity out quickly. Last time somethng like that happened in Phnom Penh, one of our cards had its executable programs deleted and as a consequense we can not upload pictures form it now. It sucks. Today we went to The Royal Palace, an awesome place. It was only bult around 1782 and has been in usage since then, so the royal family has kept it up and it looks as impressive as it was when it first stood. The temples are huge and tiled with small - maybe one centimeter square - colored, mirrored tiles. Personally, they look much better from far away than up cloase, but every building was decorated in the same manner and with the wonderful Thai sense of color. On the inside wall surrounding the main religious complex is a mural depicting war King Rama fought in great detail. The restoration seems to be continually under way and as a result the paintings are vivid to a high degree. We proably spent an hour and a half looking at them. All the temples belnded well to create a palace that took us all day to see. Right around closing time we left fully satiated but hungry, so we huuted down some food. Shiz went home to rest, I came here to upload pictures. I wish I had some to show, but like all pictures it will fail to convey the size and wonder of the place. Go there!
We are in Bangkok! The bus ride from Sukhothai drpped us off here are 5AM and we decided that since we had so much time until any place opened for check-in, we might as well walk to the closest train station, about 1.5 km. The walk wasn't bad, but it sill gets me how cities put their bus stations a couple of kilometers outside of town and then nowhere near a subway or tram station. I'm convinced that it's for the tuk-tuks and taxi drivers, but it still irritates me. We made the walk, got on a train, then found a Citibank ATM becuase money was getting a bit tight and we needed to take out cash for Thailand and Malaysia. Since we still had time after that, we thought that we might as well go start our India visa application process, since we heard that it can take up to five days. We walked the long walk to the Embassy with our pakcs from the closest (loosely using that word) tram station, only to be told by the gaurd that the vsa application office was a kilometer away, back the way we came. Wondering why they would not write that on the website that had very specific directons on how mch to pay, we found it and started that part of our trip. We planned to get into Bangkok on Monday jstu in case it took five days to get the visa for India. Now we just had to find a hotel and relax. In Bangkok, Khaosan Road is known as the place of dives, but where all the cheap places are. We didn't want to stay anywhere too trashy, but we do have our budget. To make tuk-tuk dirvers happy, Bangkok built subway and tram stations a good kilo or two from anything that a tourist might want to see. Where there are things to see, there are hotels. Our packs are heavy. You see our dilemma. So our first day in Bangkok left us not much liking the place. On a bad night of sleep, tired and with aching bodies, we walked and walked and walked. We thought that we would just head for Khaosan and find somewhere halfway where we could bed down, but for some wierd reason there are no cheap hotels in Bangkok outside of Khaosan road. Perhaps we took the wrong roads, but we walked for forty minutes past nothing but car parts shops, wondering how one makes an economy out of this. It was bizarre. Eventually we found a good place one street away from Khaosan Road, wishing that we had done our Indian visas at Chiang Mai. About four PM we went to sleep and slept slept slept.
Today we slept in, took our time in the morning, and feeling much better walked to do some light traveling. While we were looking at the outside of Wat Ratchanaddaram, a guy came up to us asking where we were, what our plans were, the regular intro for tuk-tuk drivers. We chatted, ready to turn him down at anytime. He asked us if we heard the news and tld us that today was a Buddhist holiday, so lots of temples were closed but some were open. The government would also subsidize gas for tuk-tuks, meaning that a tour of three temples would cost us 10 Baht ($.30) per person for government approved tuk-tuks (they have yellow license plaes, non-approved have white ones). Now, ths sounded really fishy, but he called over a driver and talked with him. We doubled-checked with the guy that it was 10 Baht per person for these temples and he confirmed. We got on his tuk-tuk suspiciously, but he was a really nice guy, waited for us outside our temples like he said he would, and had agreed to the price beforehand, so we though "what the hell" and went with it. We lked talking to him and saw some free temples that we probably would not have thought to go to. To get his gas, though, he needed to get coupons from government run stores. He did this by taking us to a jewelry stoer, a suit store, and a travel agent. Any place that we stayed for ten minutes or more he got a coupon for 5 litres of free gas. If we bought something, he got more coupons. We told him that we were traveling for a long time so we weren't going to buy anything, but since the ride was so cheap we would ahppily go to a couple of places and help him get free gas. He ended up getting 10 litres through us and while I would have liked to get a tailor-made suit for $200, it isn't happening this trip. On the way to the last stop he started asking us why we didn't get anythng and looked a little disappointed that we hadn't. We walked back from the the last place he took us because we wanted to walk for a bit, plus it gave
On the way to Bangkok, we stopped in a town about halfway and famous for its old city, Sukhothai. Shiz was adamant about going here and it is a good thing that we stopped! Yesterday we arrived in the new city, found a place, then went to a very disappointing night market before heading to bed (I stayed up to watch Everton vs. Arsenal becuase Donovan was starting.) This morning after a 6 AM wake-up we took a bus to old Sukhothai and spent 6 hours or so walking around. The place is in ruins, but every now and again you can see some facing still on the walls. At first glance it is impressive in its scale, but the buildings are pretty regular. Once we saw some fragmanets of how it was supposed to look, we could imagine the rest in and kind of see how it used to look. If only we had a time machine. It would have been really impressive - it still is, though for different reasons - with its rows of Buddhas, halls, and ponds. I don't have pictures to post, so they'll be a while in coming. The highlights were a three-towered wat and a 15 meter or so Buddha statue. Really neat. We have seen a lot of Buddha statues, and Shiz and I are wondering something. Who has had more images of him made, Jesus or Buddha? Think about it, it's really hard. The only thing I am sure of is that it is not The Prophet Muhammed. In other news, we are changing our travel plans a bit. We found a cheap flight from Bangkok to Colombo, but as it routed through Kuala Lumpur, we decided to just go and see Malaysia. So, tonight we take a night bus to Bangkok, see it and Ayutthaya for a week, then take our time heading West and South, eventually hitting Phuket. The last week of January we're taking a wek to relax in Krabi, then we'll spend one week in Malaysia slothing our way to Kuala Lumpur. After that we take a flight to Colombo, spend a week in Sri Lanka, then a month in India! Weather made us chage the plans after India, so we will go to Egypt first, then Greece and Turkey, down to South Africa for the World Cup, then fly to hopefully Nairobi, take a bus up to Ethiopia, and if we run out of money go home. If not, we'll finda country and travel until we break our bank account. That's the plan for now, but who knows how it will change. We almost have too much time before World Cup, so we may see if we can get a cheap flight to somewhere for the week after Turkey. I hope it works! We're off to Bangkok in a couple of hours and if the internet keeps up like this then there should be decently frequent posts. Sorry for the big gap, so keep checking back! Also, last thing:
Blake and Zeke, congradulations!!!!! They recently got engaged and I