Everyone we’ve spoken to and every book on Thailand that we’ve read has confirmed that Thais in general have a habit of rising early and completing a morning’s work before the serious heat of the day kicks in at around, ooooh I don’t know, 11.00am. From that point on it gets hotter and hotter until 3pm or so when it starts to cool down in only the most tongue-in-cheek relative terms.
We finally took the advice, got as close as we could to an early start after a hot, shit nights sleep and at 9am (according to our little travel thermometer) it was just creeping up to 32 degrees Celcius – some way above my most cautious hopes and enough, under any circumstances, to have me flailing around like a freshly-caught fish in a bucket and looking twice as sorry for myself.
Our plan for the day was to get up early, hire bicycles (stop laughing), see Ayuthaya by pedal-power and get it all over and done with before 12.00ish and before the heat got out of hand.
If we’d thought about this a bit more we’d have realised that, as we couldn’t check into our new hotel until after 11am and we had to check out of the current hotel BY 11.00 we’d either have to limit our tour to under two hours or each carry 20kg of luggage for the day. We ditched the bike plan and hiked our way to one of the main Wats just out of town.
(By the way, any time you speak to an English person here and tell them you’ve been to such-and-such Wat today (there’s thousands), quick as a flash they’ll feign deafness, cup a hand to their ear and say “What?”. You actually can’t stop yourself doing it when it’s your turn, it’s like a form of national Tourette’s. It even works if you pronounce it Wot as the two make a nice little “flip-flop” sound together. Bless the English).
Don’t get me wrong, while it’s very nice to walk around and some sites are fantastic, there are only so many half collapsed brick walls I can look at before thinking that if you scattered a few 1970s washing machines and rusty Sky dishes about you could be walking down a residential road back in Merton. This one got a thumbs up though and the pictures are up on Flickr – depending on when you’re reading this, the little thumbnails on the right should take you straight there.
Only worrying news is that I’m finding myself listening to Sigur Ros far more often than is healthy – if I’m turning emo, someone give my dad a gun to bring to Thailand. When I start raving about God Is An Astronaut, load it.
