Ayutthaya one of the ancient capitals of Thailand. We stayed in a small guesthouse called Tony's Place, which was an old fashioned Thai Teak house on stilts. Our room was cheap although the bathroom was still strange and had a door that looked like it belonged on a cattle shed!

Our first night was planned to be quiet as we were tired, but it never quite works out that way! There was a tiny little Jazz bar next door that was quite expensive (well by our standard of living still dirt cheap compared to home for cocktails!) And we spent all night there listening to the band and getting drunk on some really nice cocktails. The band were really friendly and the drummer (called Fluke) tried to teach Si how to play the bongo's, and because we spent over 500 baht (about 8 quid) we got a free cocktail! They also took our picture with them and you'll see it on the website soon hopefully!

The following early morning cancelled, we managed to drag ourselves out of bed for midday and decided to be really lazy and booked two tours to see all of the ruins! The first one took us on a boat tour around the island (As Ayutthaya is surrounded by rivers on all sides). The boat didn't look too safe, in fact was tiny! But thats Thailand so we got in and hoped for the best. Our "tour guide" took us to 3 temples. The first was to see the biggest Buddha in Thailand...again (as everywhere with a big Buddha claims to hold this honour) I'm sure this would've been amazing except he was under renovation and covered in scaffolding. So we headed off to the next temple. this one was a bit more ancient and the only thing that really looked good was the herd of cattle eating the grass in the middle of it! The final one was more the real deal, a big ancient temple complete with Buddha's, Stupas and Wats galore. On the way home the woman who was driving suddenly stopped and pointed to the side where we saw this huge lizard/snake thing trying to get out of the water! There were children swimming in the river and people doing their washing, completely unphased by them so we assume they were not dangerous but still would not like to be in the water with them at all!

As soon as we were home we were off again for the night tour, where we went to various different Wats, ruins and temples by tuk tuk and saw them all lit up at night. But by far the best bit was the elephant Kraal. The elephant is very important to the Thai's as they are the royal animals much like our swans and this place was where the king kept his elephants when this was the capital. They were so cute and there were some baby ones as well only 17 days old and still nearly as tall as me, you could feed them bamboo and they would take it from your hand and watch them and stroke them if they came near enough but the babies were quite shy, in short amazing and when we do get pictures up there will be a lot of elephants!

The next morning we got bikes and did some of the major temples in the area, and saw more elephants! We also went to a museum that is supposed to be state of the art, and was funded by the Japanese who put $6.8 million into it...where we ask?It was run down not very informative at all. It had some good bits in it's defence though like a replica of an old Thai Teak house and it showed what the different rooms were used for and how the people lived when Ayutthaya was a thriving city.

That was about it before we headed off north, first stopping at Lopburi for the day and then Sukhothai. As we're outhere for different experiences we decided to try the train, it runs worse than ours at home!