Wat Ratchaburana

Woke up to the happy news that Trump had been impeached, but not sure that it will make a blind bit of difference. In even more disturbing news, learnt that Katie Price & Harvey were jetting out to Thailand for Christmas.

On the our balcony table was a lovely juicy mango & a knife......crawling with ants. A lady also came along & told us she would be cleaning our room later. The mango made for a nice sticky mess & we finally got on the road on our Honda scooter about 10am.

Today we were heading for Wat Muang, which I knew was somewhere near An Thong 31 miles away. We soon had negotiated Ayutthaya and we were heading north. A few miles out of the city, we found The Monument of King Naresuan the Great. It was down a long Avenue with hundreds of elephant 🐘 topiaries in a line down the central reservation. At the end of the Avenue was a roundabout with a statue of the King on horseback & weirdly the roundabout was surrounded with cockerels 🐔 🐓 of all sizes.

Behind the King Naresuan Monument was Wat Phukhao Thong, built by King Naresuan in 1387. A large white Chedi was built on the base of Wat Phukhao Thong in 1569 by King Hongsowadi of Burma to celebrate the taking of Ayutthaya. At Wat Phukhao Thong, we purchased a Latte Frappe each, which would do for breakfast.

We continued north towards An Thong & soon started picking up signs for Wat Muang, what could go wrong now?

First of all, Jackie turned into a ‘Nervous Nancy’ forcing me to slow down, because we were going too fast......on our clapped out Honda. Then she turned into a backseat driver, updating me with every vehicle coming up behind us & every bump or hole or dead dog in front of us. Then Jackie started moaning about her bum aching & never stopped.

Luckily we weren’t lost, but as we approached An Thong the signs for Wat Muang disappeared. We drove on but nothing. We started to ask random people, but no-one could speak English & just looked at us as if we were crazy. Jackie then came up with the bright idea of showing people our destination on my phone. With no internet, I managed to retrieve a YouTube video & screenshot it.

This did the trick & the first schoolgirl who saw it pointed us in the right direction using sign language. We tried to follow her directions, but soon we felt lost again. We stopped & asked some bloke who whilst laughing to his mates pointed us in the opposite direction. We ignored him, but it turned out he was probably right!

On & on we went & stopped several other people, I even asked in an office at a medical centre. Eventually we started to go back on ourselves & found a sign again. Then I saw the golden Buddha at Wat Muang looming up on the horizon, but only for it to disappear again.

After asking yet more people & having 2 aborted attempts to get to it with it now in our sights, we finally arrived at Wat Muang, now gone 1pm & having ridden at least 20 miles further than necessary.

Wat Muang was excellent and definitely worth the effort to get there. The huge gold Buddha is the largest sitting Buddha in the whole of Thailand. It measures 92 metres tall & 63 metres wide and was only completed in 2008 at a cost of 104,200,000 Baht (about £2.5 million). We walked around it & photo’d it from most angles.

In front of the massive Buddha were hundreds of statues in a garden apparently depicting Heaven & Hell. The Hellish statues were pretty bloody & gruesome. The statues had cloths wrapped around their waists to protect their modesty, but an employee was cutting off the cloths of those that were looking a bit grubby to reveal rather graphic genitalia! It was all very strange.

In the Wat Muang grounds was also a lake with the most enormous fish and a silver temple that on the inside was totally mirrored making it look enormous.

After we had completed our visit, we returned to our scooter 🛵 to continue our journey. I wanted to go on another 20 miles to the monkey town of Lopburi, where I had read that two troops of monkeys 🐒 had invaded the town & the terrorised residents could do nothing about it because of their Buddhist beliefs. Jackie, however, was having none of it, she wanted to go straight back to Ayutthaya to end this ‘absolute nightmare’, her description of our day trip. I like to think of it as an adventure!

As a result we raced back to Ayutthaya taking less than an hour. With both of our buttocks in pieces, we stopped at a little cafe called Coffee Old City for a cold Chang & some Thai food. Despite being recommended by Lonely Planet, the food was a bit bland.

Now about 3.30pm, school rush hour, we reluctantly got back on the scooter & fought our way across the city to Wat Chaiwatthanaram, which was rather nice. Wat Chaiwatthanaram was established by King Prasatthong in 1630 in homage to his mother. We paid our 50 Baht & dodged the visiting locals who had dressed up for photos in traditional costumes they had rented from a shop opposite.

One Chedi at Wat Chaiwatthanaram contained the relics of Prince Thammathibet (Prince Kung) who was cited in the Royal Annals as having committed a crime by having an affair with Prince Sangwal, one of his father, King Barommakot’s concubines. Consequently, Prince Thammathibet was punished by being whipped to death.

After a pleasant stroll, we decided we had had enough for the day so we set off for our Homestay. On the way we accidentally stumbled across The Temple of the Reclining Buddha (Wat Lokayasutharam) which we had to stop at for a closer inspection. It was a bit shabby chic, but it seems it was meant to be like that, because there was a sign in front of it requesting people not to put gold leaf on the Reclining Buddha. Photo’s show it is sometimes dressed in an orange cloth.

That evening went back to our favourite restaurant, Burinda, for some more excellent food.

An alternative title for today could have read ‘Big Cocks & a Sore Arse’, but I wouldn’t want anyone to interpret it the wrong way!

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