The day we decided to go to Ayutthaya was hot, like, seriously. bloody. hot. As soon as we arrived in the old part of the city we rented some bikes and took some refuge from the heat in a coffee shop. In the cool air of the airco we planned out our day using the tourist map we received at the bike rental. Rather quick we decided to actually plan nothing at all and to just bike around the old grounds of the city and see what we’d find along the way.
After our drinks were finished and we prepared the bikes we headed off to our first stop; the Wat Mahathat. Even if you’ve never heard of this before I can assure you you’ve seen pictures on it. This temple is the one that holds a buddha head in a tree, something you see on every postcard and something I really wanted to show my friends. Nobody really knows how the Buddha head ended up in this tree, but it’s really sacred, that’s for sure! When trying to make a picture the guard standing next to it was making sure we were lower than the Buddha’s head (something that is quite hard actually, since it’s so low in the tree haha).We walked around the ruins a bit more before hitting the pedals again, on to our next stop.
All the temples and ruins are placed really close with a very nice park surrounding everything. We just biked around the park a bit enjoying the green and the serenity that we hadn’t experienced for a long time in Bangkok. We visited another temple and soon decided it was just too hot to not be on our bikes to catch some wind, so we decided to bike to a temple a bit further away. It was nice to go outside the tourist area a bit and just enjoy the surroundings of the area. The temple wasn’t that exciting, but that was fine since we soon needed to head back to hand in our bikes.
It wasn’t for another hour that we could catch a bus back to Bangkok so we had a stroll around a big market in Ayutthaya and just wandered around a bit. It was such a lovely day, because it was nice to be on a bike again, something we are so used to at home. It was the perfect place to just ride around a bit and enjoy all the surroundings which are very scenic and serene. There weren’t a lot of tourists either which made it all even more relaxed.
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