After a bumpy two hour ride in a minibus we arrived in Ayutthaya and got dropped outside a row of guesthouses. For the first time on the trip we hadn't pre-booked our accommodation but it was no problem and the first house we asked had a room for the bargain price of 200 Baht (about £4.) However when we got into the room we understood the bargain bucket rate. The room was tiny and furnished with only a bed, the fan on the ceiling when we managed to turn it on spun round lazily hardly even bothering the air around it and when we got in the showers Tom was more than a little annoyed when his shower turned itself off to a pathetic dribble about 5 minutes in.Since we were only there for one night I wasn't too worried about the primitive state of the accommodation, as I kept declaring to Tom, 'It's all an experience! However Tom was not quite so forgiving and of course blamed my cheapskate tendencies for his uncomfortable night.

After we'd dumped our bags we set of for a little explore of the town and to buy our train tickets for the overnight train to Chaing Mai the following night.As ever we refused the offers of the Tuk Tuk drivers and relied on our own feet but about 15 minutes in when we found ourselves crossing a major road bridge we may have regretted this choice.For some unfathomable reason we always seem to pick the most unscenic of routes, usually they involve lots of traffic and large industrial buildings. Tickets successfully purchased we gave in and took a Tuk Tuk over to the Elephant Camp where the elephants were just coming back after a day of giving people rides around the ruins and I was transfixed as they wandered freely around the area. Just as I was telling Tom how calm and gentle they looked one lumbered over near me and rather contradictorily I quickly scarpered in fear of its big feet! After I was done staring at the elephants we had dinner and spent the evening at a bar across the road where they had a little pool where we dipped our feet whilst sipping our drinks and felt very self indulgent.

We headed back to our little room and so ensued the drama of the mosquito nets. We attempted to set up two single nets on the double bed and Tom's smugness knew no bounds as he gloated over the lameness of my pathetic little net bought in the sale whilst his snazzy expensive beast of a net with its many clips and hooks hung proudly. This was made even worse when whilst he was in the bathroom I hit my hand on the ceiling fan whilst trying to clip mine up so when he returned not only was my net a definite failure but I was clutching my bruised hand in pain.According to Tom this was yet another indication of my bargain hunting precluding disaster, personally I think I was just unlucky and my little net would do just fine if only the beds were a foot wide.

The following day we hired bicycles to explore the ruins and after doing a couple of circuits of the same one on our bikes we decided to leave the map and just pedal wherever. We headed out to the outskirts and luckily stumbled across a floating market and water theatre where we paid £1 to enter and then spent the next two hours being thoroughly entertained by Thai performers on a platform in the middle of a lake whilst we sat on a bamboo structure round the outside stuffing our little faces. We watched two shows, the first being some kind of farce involving men hiding from the pretty ladies and trying to woo them and then the second involving a crocodile man a warrior and another beautiful woman. Believe it or not the true star of the second show was a Mr Thomas Lindfield himself. He had positioned himself in a prime location at the front so he could snap away and in true pantomime style the crocodile man left the beautiful girl with Tom to look after. I'm sure you can imagine that he turned every shade of rouge possible and although I sprinted to the front to take a picture of his dramatic debut I wasn't in time to capture the full extent of it so you will just have to imagine the glorious moment!After the show we headed back to the town and due to the blazing sun handed our bikes back early and took shelter in a coffee shop.

After dinner we gathered up our bags and headed to the train station in anticipation of an interesting 12 hour ride to Chaing Mai, the second biggest city and Thailand's trekking capital of the north.