The River Khwae to Ayutthaya

Friday, January 3, 2014

‘Milk meeting on the River Khwae’ Getting our respective coffee and tea for breakfast we missed fresh milk so Stephen went to get some from our car fridge. Another guest made a comment to her husband about it, we smiled at each other and next thing we met Tania and Dmitriy and their girl Vlada. Turns out they are from Vladivostok, so we exchanged contact details and we may just meet again when we are there!

After that delightful meeting we set out towards Ayutthaya. We made 3 stops en route.

First we came across a ‘Vietnam Veteran Museum’, but the 2 buildings were empty. An old plane, we think it was a C130, and helicopter were ‘on display’ – and very accessible.

Secondly we noticed a giant Buddha, so we decided to check it out. To our surprise we seemed to have walked straight into hell. This was ‘Wat Phai Rong Wua’. This temple definitely shows a side of Buddhism that we (Westerners) don’t often get to see (or want to see maybe); we did not see any other Westerners there. The whole site of the ‘Land of Hell’ is a rather graphic depiction of ‘punishment in the afterlife for Buddhist rules broken on earth’. ‘The Fate of Rural Hell’ – The University of Chicago PressBooks.

I couldn’t find any links I liked to it (apart from travel writings, or ‘oddity’ style links, so best to google it to find out more). This it the best I could find:

On the other side of the complex we found hundreds of Buddha Statues, and yes, I definitely liked that part of the Temple complex much better!

Our third stop was the Royal Summer Palaca at Bang Pa-In where we enjoyed a stroll around the gardens and ecclectic groups of buildings and palaces in styles from around the world.