In our hire car, a silver Toyota saloon, we drove from Bangkok airport to Ayutthaya, around 90 kilometres to the north. The city is like an island surrounded by rivers. The flood disaster of the last few weeks therefore hit the area particularly hard.
We don't know exactly when the water started to drain away again - but it can't have been long ago. In many places on the streets, piles of rubbish are still being collected or sandbags cleared away. On some houses, we could still clearly see that the floodwater was about 1.5 metres high.
Restaurant search in Sin City
So in the evening we went in search of a restaurant. As we walked through the town, however, there were many places we didn't feel quite right. The street lights were out, there were dogs roaming around and no one was on foot. Apart from a few open shops, everything was dark and barricaded. Some houses had collapsed and the inhabitants were living in tents or we could see straight into their living rooms through the broken walls. Welcome to Sin City! After wandering around for almost an hour and still not finding anywhere to eat, we only had a Mars bar from the supermarket for dinner. This market had also fallen victim to the floods and was only half rebuilt. There were still large gaps on most of the shelves and the only things that were available in abundance were washing powder and shampoo!
Floating markets of Ayutthaya
The next morning, after a hearty breakfast at the hotel - the chocolate bar hadn't helped much - we set off for the floating markets. As bad as it may sound, floating, or rather diving, is to be taken literally here. The jetties where the traders normally sell their wares from their boats were mostly submerged in the water or destroyed. So we were standing in the middle of a ruin, but no work had been done on it.
Wat Phra Sri Sanphet, Wat Rat Burana & Wat Mahathat
We then visited four more temples, including Wat Phra Sri Sanphet. This was the royal temple on the grounds of the old royal palace in Ayutthaya. In the centre of the complex are three well-restored chedis on a raised platform. A chedi is a tower built in a cyclonic style that resembles a bell. Small chapels are set in each direction, with steep steps leading up to them.
Wat Chaiwatanaram
Our last temple complex in Ayutthaya was Wat Chaiwatanaram. The clean-up and pumping out work only began here a few days ago. The centre was still surrounded by water and the areas that were already exposed were dirty and muddy. In this case, the unfavourable location by the river was the temple's undoing. Although there is a reasonably stable dam a few metres high, it could not withstand the masses.
With a depressing feeling of having just committed a kind of disaster tourism, we rolled back towards Bangkok. It took us a total of three hours to complete the original one-hour journey due to a traffic jam in front of the toll booth and the confusing road layout. We drove in circles for almost 1.5 hours until we finally found the right exit to return the hire car. Completely exasperated, we left the day in the Twin Towers Hotel in Bangkok end the day.
