Feb 19

Feb 19 Ancient City of Ayutthaya, Thailand

Ayutthaya is a city that is located just an hour north of Bangkok and we highly encourage anyone who is visiting Bangkok to at least take a daytrip to see Ayutthaya. The city is home to Ayutthaya Historical Park, which contains the ruins of the old Siamese kingdom that ruled for 400 years (1350 CE– 1767 CE). The park has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so this is a must see in order to better understand the historical and cultural legacy of Thailand.

· Transportation: If you are coming from Bangkok, we suggest that you hire a private driver as the trip takes about one hour each way and such a long drive to and from your hotel can be quite difficult. Make sure to negotiate a price beforehand and also make sure that your driver can communicate in English (or whatever language you prefer).

Nina and I made the mistake of hiring a driver, through our hotel, who didn’t speak English. We only realized this linguistic barrier when we arrived within the city limits of Ayutthaya and our driver was like “Ok. Ayutthaya!”, not realizing that we were trying to visit the historical park. In fact, nobody had communicated to our driver where within Ayutthaya we wanted to go and now we were stuck trying to communicate via gesticulation and grunting.

· Expectations: We should have done more research on the topic of Ayutthaya before we went to Thailand. We thought that visiting Ayutthaya would be similar to visiting any other place with ruins such as Pompeii or Rome, in that once you arrive it is quite obvious where you should go to see the ruins. However, it turns out that Ayutthaya is an actual modern-day city with no information booths (those booths with the iconic letter “i” in cursive spelling that you see throughout cities in Europe). Since our driver didn’t speak English and we hadn’t done our research on where we specifically needed to go inside of Ayutthaya, we ended up wasting several hours driving aimlessly around the city, hoping that some ruins would make themselves visible so that we could then point to them and say “There! Go there!”

Our saving grace came when we asked the driver to pull over so that we could use the restroom at some random temple. At this particular temple (whose name escapes me but was rather impressive with its sheer height), we met a random Italian family who happened to be vacationing in Ayutthaya and had in their possession a map of Ayutthaya Historical Park. We borrowed the map, took it to our driver who then finally understood where we wanted to go, and we continued with our visit.

The lesson here is to know that there is an “old city”, which is where the historical park with all of the ruins are located, and a “new city” which is located a few miles away from the park. Communicate where you want to go beforehand and make sure that you can communicate with your driver in whichever language suits you best.