The last day in Bangkok we had a full day before catching our late night flight to Japan. There were warnings that there would be a large political protest in downtown Bangkok that day and that a lot of places would be closed and traffic would likely be snarled so I decided it would be best to spend the day touring outside the city.

I signed up for a tour of Ayutthaya, the previous capital of Thailand. It was the capital of Thailand from the year 1438 until the city was attacked and destroyed by the Burmese in 1767. Only the sturdiest buildings survived even though the city at one time had over 1M inhabitants and was one of the world's largest cities in the 18th century.


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Wat Yai Chai Mongkhon

The second stop was to a Wat built near the old capital city. This contained some large structures which we climbed to the top off. Inside my daughter applied gold leaf to one of the Buddha statues there. Outside the temples was a huge reclining Buddha where quite a few people were praying in front of and applying gold leaf to.


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Ayutthaya Historical Park

Finally we visited the Historical Park containing the ruins. The area is very large so we visited two different parts of it. Still I have a feeling we missed a good part of it.

The first spot we visited had some smaller structures that were in generally poor shape. The highlight in this part was the Buddha head that's inside a tree root.

The second area seems to be the main part and contains the largest structures. This area also had elephant rides, music and lots of other activities. We walked around the main area but after all the travel we had seem so many ruins of temples that we really didn't linger too long.


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