We caught a local bus to Suphan Buri about three hours away from Kachanaburi and then a minibus to Ayuthaya which is about an hours drive north of Bangkok. Ayuthaya was the ancient Royal capital which has many ruins dotted around the city.

We arrived in the early evening and for dinner we walked to the night market where there were lots of stalls that smelt amazing, we had BBQ pork, thai sausage, pork dumplings, some coconut tarts and a chocolate waffle - it was great because they serve things in a little plastic back and give you a wooden stick to eat with!

The following day we hired some bikes from our guesthouse and set off to explore - at first we ended up going in a massive circle on a scary busy road and had to go round a chaotic roundabout! But then we found an old ruin which was leaning slightly to the right but looked good. There were two rather large tourists who plodded by on top of an elephant!! We went to a modern temple where there was a huge golden buddha inside and got a drink and sat on the grass under the trees for a while - next to us there were some school girls sitting under another tree with a monk. I think they were supposed to be meditating but some of them were mucking around!

It was great on the bikes as we just chose what we wanted to see, we could hear live music coming from somewhere so we went to investigate - it was another modern temple and there were a large crowd of people with a live band and big sound system slowly walking around the outside of it. We thought at first it was a wedding but we couldn't see any bride and none of the locals could understand english! There was a man dressed in white and he looked like he had just had his head and eyebrows shaved, he had an orange umbrella held over him and people behind him were holding baskets of gifts. The live band was in front of him and in front of the band there were some seriously wasted people dancing! They tried to get us to join in but some of them were really staggering about and looked like they may have had something apart from alcohol! It was quite bizzarre - after watching for a while we set off on our bikes again and saw a reclining buddha - got a bit lost again but saw local life which was nice! On our way back to the guesthouse we stumbled accross a KFC - and thought it would be rude not to!!!

Next stop Sukothai ................................