Thailand by Train (day 11) – Ayutthaya, and a temple tuk tuk tour

Tuesday 29th November 2022

We’d booked a tuk tuk tour of the Ayutthaya temples for today. It’s relatively flat so you could also hire a bike and cycle, but it was a sweltering day when we were there so we were glad of the cool breeze when riding in the tuk tuk. We’d booked via our hotel, Siri guesthouse, and it was 1,000 baht (about £25) for the full day. I was very pleased when our driver turned up in a pink tuk tuk!

Our first temple stop was Wat Yai Chai Mongkhon. It’s main distinguishing feature is an enormous chedi, which you can climb to the top of and go inside via a staircase at the back.

Outside of the chedi is a huge reclining buddha.

Oh, and there’s also a small lake with some big turtles behind the temple. You can buy food to feed them, which is quite fun.

Wat Yai Chai Mongkhon is free to enter, and I found it to be one of the more interesting temples in Ayutthaya so would definitely recommend including it if you’re visiting the old temples of Ayutthaya.

Our next stop was Phra Mongkhon Bophit. From the outside, it’s quite modern looking and the red and gold exterior looks pretty but doesn’t really stand out as a must see temple.

However, inside is one of the largest bronze Buddha images in Thailand. It’s huge, and truly impressive. It was built in the early Ayutthaya period, and the total height of the image is almost 17 metres!

Next door to Phra Mongkhon Bophit is Wat Phra Si Sanphet, a much more ancient looking temple with a lot of old chedis. This temple has an entrance fee (50 baht, or about £1.25 for foreigners).

Just across the road is Wat Phra Ram, which also has a 50 baht fee for foreigners. It dates from 1369, and so some of the temple is in ruins. It’s a big site, with a huge central Prang and foundations and old ruins of various buildings and several small chedis surrounding it.

Wat Phra Ram is also next to a large and attractive looking park with a big lake in the middle, Bueng Phra Ram Park. Apparently it used to be a massive swamp in front of the old temple.

We got back in the tuk tuk and drove to Wat Lokaya Sutharam. There’s not much left of the temple itself, but there’s a huge reclining buddha (Phra Buddha Sai Yat), which was restored in 1954.

We next went to Wat Chaiwatthanaram, which reminded me slightly of some of the temples we saw at Angkor Wat. I later found out that Wat Chaiwatthanaram has some Khmer influence, which probably explains the slight resemblance. It’s another temple with a 50 baht entrance fee, but is definitely worth a visit.

We then visited Wat Phu Khao Thong, whose main feature is a huge 50 metre white chedi. You can climb up the steps to the platform about half way up the chedi for views over Ayutthaya.

On the way out of the temple, we drove past a roundabout with hundreds of rooster statues surrounding it, which I thought was quite cool.

We then went to Wat Thammikarat, which has a Buddha head on a lotus flower outside of the temple entrance.

The main temple building (the Royal Sermon Hall) is huge and must have been very impressive when it was fully intact.

Only the foundations remain of the smaller sermon hall (or Vihara) next to the Royal Sermon Hall, but these have been decorated with hundreds of rooster statues.

Our final stop was Wat Mahathat. It’s another ancient temple that’s in ruins and is on a vast scale, but it’s main distinguishing feature is Buddha’s face in a tree. Wat Mahathat is also one of the temples with paid admission of 50 baht.

Wat Mahathat is right opposite the night market, which was just opening up for the night. We had a wander around and bought some fish cakes and a cheese roti as a snack to share. They were both freshly cooked and very good (much better than the coconut pancakes we’d tried yesterday).

We were catching the 6pm train to Bangkok, so we had an early dinner at The shop knows – ร้านรู้เองจ๊ะ. We ordered a chicken pad Thai and a pork fried rice. The pad Thai wasn’t amazing, definitely not the best we’ve had. The fried rice was better (it had that smokey wok flavour) but not exceptional.

We walked back to Siri guesthouse to pick up our bags and order a Grab car to the station. Annoyingly the train was over an hour late so we had a long wait at the station. The journey itself though was very pleasant, we were in the 2nd class air conditioned carriage again so the seats were comfortable with plenty of legroom.

It was late by the time we got to our hotel in Bangkok, so we didn’t bother going into town, and instead just watched an episode of Manifest on Netflix then went to bed.