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The plan was to travel Chiang Mai today, via a small town named Lopburi. Spending the day in Lopburi allowed us to avoid the usual waiting around until the 11 hour night train further north to Chiang Mai, one of Thailand's largest cities known for its days trip such as cooking schools, climbing, trekking etc.
We checked out of the "tent" and after about a fifteen minute walk we got a small ferry 50 metres across the water to the train station. This was our first was night trained we'd booked in Thailand so not knowing really what to do we went to the advance reservation counter, only to find all the tickets at reasonable process were fully booked for tonight and tomorrow. The only other alternative was to catch the "V.I.P" bus but without a bed or even decent seat this was going to be a long night. On the flip-side this meant we could actually spend the rest of the day seeing Thailand's old capital, Ayutthaya.
We had lunch in the market then spent the afternoon looking around Wat Phra Mahathat (shown in the photos), ruins of a temple that was built to house the remains of Buddha.
The evening came and time to board the "V.I.P" bus at the end of the road.........
Instead we were picked up by a heavily overloaded tuk-tuk and driven about 5 miles and dropped off at the side of the main motorway en-route to Chiang Mai. After the further half hour of mosquito bites the "V.I.P" bus complete with, "chairs with lots of space", "movie" and no further transfers arrived. The heap of junk then drove for three or four hours and pulled into the service station. We guessed it was just the usual café job so continued to try and sleep rather than getting off. We then realised when new faces started piling onto the bus we were actually changing buses. Begrudgingly changing buses as we had no choice, we grabbed some Thai sized seat on the next heap of junk which was even worse than the previous bus. All night long the rear wheel made a whirring noise. Then to top off the nightmare journey rather than actually stopping in the town, we were dropped about 3 miles out (wasn't sure where we were at the time), and told to board small pick-ups. The pick-ups did not tell us where we were going to be dropped off all they said was "the city centre". Surprise, surprise, the next stop was the drivers hotel!
As agreed en-route, on arrival at the guest house Tom quickly jumped to the roof of pick-up, removed our bags and away we ran before the guy new we'd left. Good stuff!
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