My second greatest regret of our tour was the brevity of our visit to the province of Ayutthaya or Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya as it is officially known. The area was the former capital city of Siam (now known as Thailand) before the designation was moved further south to Bangkok.
I was fascinated by the less ostentatious and more ancient architecture of the province and would have contentedly spent a week or more there if given the opportunity. It was the confluence of Thai, Khmer, and Burmese culture and history that made the place so intriguing. I have always been a sucker for those regions of the world where distinct peoples had converged and left their marks–Turkey, where Europe and Asia collided; the “stans” in Central Asia, where the fabled Silk Road passed; Gandhara, where a Greek outpost was built in Northern India in the 1st millennium BCE.
Historic records indicate that the land was first populated by the Khmer ethnic group of neighboring modern-day Cambodia and named after one of the holiest cities in India, Ayodhya. The influence of the race could still be seen in the crumbling wats, more columnar than pyramidical like Thai holy structures.
At night, the Khmer-inspired temples of Wat Phra Si Sanphet took on an otherworldly mystique, which is partly the reason why the Angkor Wat in Cambodia shot to the near top of my travel bucket list.
