January 7 was a “free” day for us, in the sense that there weren’t any scheduled tours. So, naturally, we spent that time by . . . going to museums. Specifically, to the National Museum, next door to the Grand Palace in the center of Bangkok. We went by subway, which was easy, although it meant a bit of a walk to the actual museum entrance. 

This did result in the single moment of scary traffic in our entire visit to southeast Asia — we crossed a street at a marked crosswalk, a vehicle stopped to let us pass, and some moron on a scooter decided to pass the stopped car and whipped by us, missing by inches. 

The museum is interesting, chronicling the cultures of the region from prehistory to the present day. If you like to look at images of the Buddha it is definitely a place you should visit, because apparently the National Museum is where all the Buddhas presented to the King of Thailand get put — and lots of people give Buddhas to the King. I bet he grumbles privately that nobody ever gives him Legos or Cheesecake Factory gift cards.

From the National Museum we walked to the Royal Theater, in the Chinatown district. Our walk took us along Atsadang Road, which parallels one of the (non-navigable) canals in the center of Bangkok. The street was lined with a fascinating mix of shops selling musical instruments, alternating with shops selling military uniforms and tactical gear.

The Royal Theater is a former movie palace, now featuring a performance of traditional Thai Khon dance. We watched a segment from the Ramayana, centered on Hanuman, the Monkey King who led his army of apes to help Rama defeat the demon king Ravana.

I find the difference between the Khon dance and western dance intriguing. The absolutely dominant feature of western dance is that the dancer’s movements are in synch with the beats of the music. The feet hit the floor in unison with the notes sounded by the orchestra. Khon dance isn’t like that (and I saw a couple of performances so it wasn’t a case of inept dancers). The dancers dance — and one might just as well call it “mime” as dance — while music plays. It’s more like background music.

The costumes were amazing, by the way.

We lunched nearby at a food court (upstairs from about half a dozen gun shops all in the same shopping center). The food was excellent, and we saw a dancer wearing some of his Hanuman costume eating there, so I guess that’s a recommendation. Diane had a delicious stewed pork dish from northern Thailand, while I had some perfectly adequate noodles.

That afternoon was spent back at the U Sathorn, with a shower and a nap, then drinks beside the pool until it got too buggy outside, and finally to bed.

We did not go swimming, because we had to pack up everything to be ready to leave the next morning and didn’t want to be dragging around a bunch of wet swimsuits.  

On January 8 we woke early and met our guide and the Party Van for the ride up to Ayutthaya. It was the medieval-era capital of Siam until King Taksin (see previous post) re-established the kingdom at Bangkok — but nowadays it’s just north of the edge of the Bangkok megapolis. 

Instead of a Party Van, here’s how Henri Mouhot made the journey (the “Menam” is the river now called Chao Phraya):

“After my visits of ceremony to the two kings, I hastened to finish the preparations for my voyage. I bought a light boat capable of holding all my chests, reserving a narrow space for myself, and another for the bipeds and quadrupeds forming my adopted family—viz., two rowers, one of whom also officiated as cook, a parroquet, an ape, and a dog. One of the boatmen was a Cambodian, and the other an Annamite, both Christians, and knowing a few words of Latin and English, so that, as I had already picked up a little Siamese, I could make myself pretty well understood. 

“On the 19th October I quitted Bangkok, and commenced my voyage up the Menam. The current runs very strongly at this season, and it took us five days to go about seventy miles. At night we suffered terribly from the mosquitoes, and even during the day had to keep up an incessant fanning to drive off these pestilent little vampires. They were so numerous that you could catch them by handfuls, and their humming resembled that of a hive of bees.”

Fortunately for us we didn’t encounter nearly as many mosquitos. I have a suspicion the Thai authorities do a lot of spraying during the rainy season.

Ayutthaya is a small city, about 50,000 people, but it’s part of a big sprawl of industrial areas around Bangkok, so it’s kind of like a lot of European cities: a medieval core where all the tourists go, surrounded by the modern metropolis where the locals all live.

The original city was built on a large island, formed by a loop of the Chao Phraya river, the tributary Pa Sak river, and what looks to me like an old artificial canal linking the two, creating a roughly rectangular area about a mile and a half across. Something like a quarter or a third of that space is devoted to parks or preserves holding the ruins of temples and palaces from Ayutthaya’s glory days as the heart of an empire. The rest is a fairly low-density town, studded here and there with hotels, especially along the riverfronts.

When we entered Ayutthaya, our guide Sita and the Party Van handed us over to a different guide with a different van. Omalat (spelling is conjectural as we only got a verbal introduction) was our guide for a very entertaining food tour of Ayutthaya.

Our first stop was at the north end of the old city, at the Hua Ro Market. We’d seen local markets in Cambodia, but this was our first exposure to one in Thailand. There are similarities: vendors selling all manner of different things ranging from clothing to appliances to fresh produce, all seemingly randomly arranged under a single roof. The difference is that Hua Ro isn’t a collection of sheet-metal sheds. It’s actually a kind of roofed neighborhood, covering two or three blocks, with roofs over the streets between three-story buildings. The streets and the ground floors of the buildings are all market space. Upstairs are apartments and (I suspect) some offices.

Omalat was a little disappointed to discover this wasn’t our first Indochinese market rodeo, but we did come across a stall where a gentleman was making little savory coconut pancakes and very nicely allowed Dr. Kelly to try her hand at it. They were very good and we may add them to the repertoire at home.

From there we drove back out of town a fair distance into farming country for a cooking class, conducted in the front yard of a farmhouse. Our teacher was a wonderful woman about our age named Noi, assisted by her sister and her mother. 

Noi guided the two of us through the process of making a Thai meal. We pounded our own green curry paste (as a man and an American I was naturally Doing It Wrong and had to be assisted by Noi’s mother — I won’t say I’m as expert with a mortar and pestle as she was, but I couldn’t see her doing anything that I hadn’t been doing). That went into Green Curry Chicken. We made Tom Yum soup, “Son-in-Law Eggs” which are hard boiled eggs deep-fried in oil along with crispy garlic and shallots, then topped with tamarind sauce. 

The piece de resistance, of course, was Pad Thai, which Noi made using almost a 1:1 ratio of tofu and sprouts to the rice noodles, along with a ton of tamarind sauce and palm sugar. Our dessert was chunks of pumpkin stewed in sweetened coconut milk. 

None of which we ate, at least not right then. It all got carefully packed into Indian-style stacking lunch pails for our next destination. After saying our thanks and farewells to Noi and her family (and handing out some maple sugar candy brought all the way from western Massachusetts), we got back into the van and returned to central Ayutthaya, where we boarded a boat for a lunch cruise. We puttered along the Chao Phraya river eating the lunch we had made. The weather was lovely and Omalat was able to tell us a lot about the buildings on shore as we passed them. The boat was a converted “rice barge” — what were once the standard freight boats on the river, now all used for tourist outings since serious freight moves on big modern barges.

How was our cooking? Pretty good, if I do say so myself. The chicken was flavorful if a bit gristly, the soup was nice although if I make it again myself I’m going to put all the aromatics into a sachet so I can remove them before serving, the eggs were excellent, the Pad Thai a bit sticky from all the tamarind (and from sitting in the lunch pail). The dessert was extremely rich and not especially sweet — I think it might be better as a side dish or even a breakfast.

We disembarked and checked into our hotel, the lovely Sala Ayutthaya boutique hotel. Our room had a spectacular view of the Wat Phuttaisawan temple directly across the river, so as the sun went down I had a drink on the hotel’s riverside terrace.