Small town, big name

The second in my series on weekend escapes from Bangkok, and it's time to visit the seaside. We were looking, above all else, to relax - and so after considering several other options that seemed too big, too busy, or just too much like hard work, we settled on the extravagantly-named capital of Thailand's skinniest province, Prachuap Khiri Khan.

PKK (as I'm going to call it from now on, to save on keyboard wear and tear) rests peacefully in a sweeping, horseshoe bay, flanked dramatically by the spectacular karst formations that gave the town that impressive name - city of mountains.

PKK lies at the narrowest point of the Thai egg timer, 100km or so past Hua Hin. We took the train from Bangkok, which at the typically leisurely Thai railways pace takes around 5 hours. Leaving after work on friday, this should have seen us arriving around 11pm, but unfortunately the train was around 2 hours late before it even left Bangkok. Luckily, the people at our chosen accommodation, the charming Sun Beach Guesthouse, were unfazed by our late arrival, and told us not to worry as somebody would happily let us in at any hour - so we relaxed on the train and treated ourselves to dinner in the atmospheric surroundings of the restaurant car.

As our train eventually pulled into town in the small hours of the morning, we were a little concerned that we might have to walk to the guesthouse, so we were pleased to find one of PKK's distinctive motorbike-and-sidecar tuktuks waiting for us. Rather than the usual hustle, the driver calmly finished his snack and then whisked us through the sleeping streets to our accommodation - where as promised the bell summoned a sleepy receptionist who happily checked us in for a comfortable and much-needed night's sleep.

Waking refreshed the next morning, we hired bikes from the guesthouse and set out to explore the town. Now lets be frank here - there's not a great deal to do in PKK. This is a large part of it's appeal, especially as a weekend destination. The main attraction is it's charming, sleepy atmosphere, but there are a just enough sights to see to last a couple of days. The first on our list was the 'monkey mountain', which we discovered by cycling to the north end of the seafront until we reached a small mountain surrounded by monkeys. A large number of these cute but rather feral creatures hang out at the foot of the mountain on the seafront itself, swinging from the tyres hung from the trees, bathing in concrete bathtubs, or just chilling out on the beach wall. 

We watched them frolic for a while, until they attempted to steal my bike - by which point it had begun to rain, so we postponed climbing the mountain and sought shelter.

We'd read that the seafood here was spectacular wherever you went, and this proved to be true when we took shelter in the first seafront restaurant we came to and ordered some tasty crab fried rice. By the time we'd savoured it's smoky deliciousness, the rain had subsided and we headed off to climb the mountain. We soon located the bottom of the staircase around the back near the temple, and began our ascent of what is more properly known as Khao Chong Krajok. 

A group of tourists had arrived just before us with food for the monkeys, and word of this benevolence had clearly spread fast, as a stampede of the furry fiends rushed down the steps to greet them. 

Soon we were surrounded by cheeky faces and grabbing hands, which accompanied us all the way to the monastery at the top of the mountain. Whilst they could be a little aggressive at times, with a few displays of bared teeth now and then, and they're certainly not afraid to get close to people, it was a unique and charming experience, and worth braving for the views from the top.

We came down from the mountain just as the rain decided to come down from the sky, and so we fled back to the Sun Beach to shelter in comfort on the balcony and enjoy the sea view.

Sightseeing and relaxing done, it was time to eat some more. We'd heard about a market on the seafront near the pier, so headed down to check it out.

This turned out to be well worth braving the rain for, with a great selection of street food. Whilst much of it was the same stuff we'd seen elsewhere in Thailand, the quality was amazing, with everything seeming that much fresher and delicious looking than anywhere else we've been - and a few treats that were new to us, like bacon and mushroom kebabs.

After our starters-on-sticks, and a couple of beers on the seafront at the motorcycle club, we headed for dinner at Ma-prow. Everything we'd eaten so far in town had been delicious, but this trumped the lot with one of the tastiest meals we've eaten anywhere. A starter of crisp tangy green mango salad over a perfectly cooked fillet of fish, followed by an amazing rich and creamy crab curry. All in charming surroundings too - highly recommended.

Full of seafood and beer, we slept well, and awoke the next day ready to hit the beach. Whilst PKK's main bay is pretty, it's not really a beach you'd hang out on, so we set off on our trusty bikes to Ao Manao, just south of the town.

Ao Manao is a very unusual beach - it's part of an airforce base. This sounds a lot more off-putting than it really is. You simply enter the base through the entrance at the south end of the town, where a friendly chap in uniform waved us straight through, and on leaving the base are asked to sign a kind of guestbook. No ID is required - the book had a column for passport numbers, but nobody appeared to have filled it in. Passing through the base to the beach makes for a pleasant and interesting bike ride, as you cross the runway and pass by a grounded airplane, a golf course, and various other curiosities.

Eventually you emerge on the road that runs along the back of the beach. Thanks to the unusual location, there's refreshingly little in the way of development here. No high rise hotels or tacky beach bars, just a couple of food courts, some rather basic bathroom/changing facilities, and a few shops.

The food courts sell a wide range of seafood and other goodies, and you can also order from the people manning the deckchairs on the beach, who'll fetch food and drinks for you - or just rent you a chair to relax in for 10 baht.

This is very much a Thai destination, with little of the usual beachside clutter than western tourists expect, and much the better for it. Popular activities include posing for photographs, or swimming with most of your clothes on. It's a great beach for swimming, with a very shallow slope that means you can get quite some distance from the shore without getting out of your depth.

Most of all, though, this is a nice place to relax in a delightfully calm atmosphere - which could also be said of PKK as a whole. There isn't a great deal to do here, but that's rather the point. The sleepy atmosphere is quite beguiling, making this typically Thai seaside town a great place for a weekend escape from the hustle and bustle of Bangkok, and you can pretty much explore the whole place in a couple of days. Take the train, bring a book, order some seafood, and relax with a beer while the boats bob up and down in the bay. Just watch out for those monkeys.

Get your geek on

Bangkok is pretty well known for it's markets. Commerce seems like the life-blood of the city, and few people come here without doing a little shopping. I've blogged about a couple of the usual suspects already, but recently a search for a rather hard to find item led me to discover one market that not many visitors seem to make it to - Saphan Lek.

Hidden away below street level and constructed on a bridge over a canal, this is a great example of how pretty much any available space here is put to good use, especially in a crowded area like Chinatown. This isn't a market for tourists, or the claustrophobic - there are no Chang vests, buddha statues or axe cushions to be found in these crowded aisles. This is a temple to geekdom, a mecca for Bangkok's gamers, collectors, and overgrown boys in general.

This is not an easy place to find. Head down Yaorawat, Chinatown's main drag, as far as Soi 35, and look out for this bridge with the yellow flags flying on your right hand side. 

That rather uninviting selection of temporary-looking structures built over the canal is your destination. The entrance is on the left side of the bridge.

Venture between those umbrellas and you'll find a few stalls selling old cameras and lenses - plenty of old Canon and Nikon gear here for the DSLR fans among you. Make your way in a little further and you'll find the main part of the market itself. 

Squeeze down these narrow aisles, cramped, crowded and harshly-lit by fluorescent tubes - you'll need to breathe in if somebody comes the other way - and you're rewarded with what feels like a scene from Bladerunner. The smell of hot solder fills the air as dozens of stallholders sit in cupboard-like spaces surrounded by dismembered games consoles, poking at circuit boards as they watch TV. Elsewhere, monks play Fifa next to racks of games of somewhat dubious provenance. Glass display cabinets groan under the weight of thousands of anime figurines. Other stalls bristle with what I sincerely hope are replica firearms.

Elsewhere you'll find radio-controlled cars and helicopters, trading card games, PC parts, Blu-ray movies, and surprising selection of vintage hifi gear.

Gamers, though, seem to be the main customers - pretty much everything game-related can be found here. Controllers, games and accessories for every console you can think of, and several others besides, as well as the consoles themselves, whole and in part, and modified in front of your eyes.

So if you're hankering for something geeky, this is the place to come. Even if you're not, it's worth it just to experience a market unlike anything you've seen before. It's a grown-up kid's paradise. Like taking a walk through the murkiest corners of eBay. Nerdvana.

Weekending in Ayutthaya

Being a Bangkok house husband means playing many roles. One of the most fun is travel agent - whilst my hard-working beloved is out winning the bread, I get to plan fun things for us to do at the weekend. I'll be sharing some of these here on the blog, in the hope that others might benefit from the fruits of my research.

So, first up was a place I've visited before and knew would make a nice, easy and cheap weekend out of town - Ayutthaya. After all, what better place to start exploring our newly-adopted country than one of the great seats of it's culture?

Getting here is simplicity itself, and unbelievably cheap. A third-class ticket on the ordinary train from Bangkok costs a remarkable 15 baht!

A bargain for a journey of two hours or so. For some reason, you can't buy a ticket for these trains more than an hour in advance, so your best bet is simply to rock up at Hualamphong after work on friday, present yourself at the ticket office and hope for the best. Trains seem to run every hour or so, with the occasional express that cuts half an hour off the journey but costs a lot more for the privilege. Conditions in third class are somewhat basic, but fine for a journey this length. Get to the platform good and early and you should hopefully get a seat - the train fills up somewhat as it makes its way slowly through Bangkok's suburban stations, taking about an hour just to get out of town - but it's a relaxing and interesting way to travel. For more info, see the ever-useful railway guru, Man in Seat 61.

Once you arrive at Ayutthaya station, getting into town is easy too. Obviously, a number of the town's rather funky-looking tuktuks will be there to greet you, but we preferred simply to walk.

The route is pretty straightforward. Just walk out of the station and across the road, heading down the alley between the food stalls directly opposite the station entrance. At the end you'll find a well-signposted ferry pier, where a few baht will get you across one of the rivers that surround the old town and onto the 'island' itself.

Once across the river, a right turn will lead you towards Naresuan Soi 2, Ayutthaya's cousin to Khaosan Road (of which more later), but we preferred to stay somewhere a little less backpackery, and so headed straight on towards the historical park at the centre of the island. There, down a pleasant little alley opposite Wat Mahathat, lies the thoroughly charming Tamarind guest house.

Discovered with the help of the marvellous Travelfish, who in years of using them to find accommodation have never steered me wrong, this is a lovely place to stay. Endearingly ramshackle but spotlessly clean, with a welcoming owner who couldn't be more helpful, a great location right opposite some of the main sights, and bargain prices too.

So, having checked in and deposited our bags, we were hungry and in need of a drink. Times like this, when you've just arrived in town and want your immediate needs met without complication, are when a backpacker 'ghetto' comes in rather handy, so back to Soi 2 we went. To be honest, the comparison to Khaosan Road is rather unfair - especially out of season, when this short, somewhat low-key strip of bars and restaurants is actually rather charming. 

We grabbed a seat at Street Lamp, which seemed to be the busiest of the bars, and they took very good care of us, providing cheap beer (Big Chang, 60 baht. - we're not in Bangkok now!) and simple but tasty and good value food. All this in a friendly and fun atmosphere, with entertainment provided by the house band - who offered the usual Thai-style covers of stuff your dad likes, but gamely played on through the power cut which transformed our meal into a more romantic, candle-lit affair than we were expecting. Once the power returned, they even welcomed one of our fellow punters up on stage, lending him a guitar to live out his axe-hero fantasies. They were eventually forced to stop, though, when the rainy season lived up to it's billing with a spectacular downpour that forced us all inside, then flooded the bar itself!

One of the joys of travelling during the rainy season is the occasional forcibly-extended bar visit, and so after several more beers than we were planning on, we walked through the sodden streets back to the guest house. The next morning was thus a little fuzzier than we hoped, but we headed out to see some sights regardless, after hiring bicycles from our ever-helpful host - 50 baht each for the day, which seems to be the going rate.

There are plenty of guides that detail the wealth of historical sites Ayutthaya has to offer, so I won't retread that ground here. Besides which, it doesn't pay to get too hung up on obsessively ticking off the temples - simply cycling around this town littered with treasures can be the most rewarding thing, admiring them as you glide past, rather than clambering over them in the company of a coach-load of tourists. Pick a few sites carefully to explore more thoroughly. 

No matter how good your intentions, as the day gets hotter and you approach yet another pile of old bricks, temple fatigue can set in. A nice way to escape the sun for a while and set what you've seen in some context is to visit one of the town's museums. We checked out the Chao Sam Phraya Museum, just south of the historical park, which as you'd expect contains a fine collection of buddha images, a number of which were apparently found packed inside the colossal Phra Mongkhon Bophit statue located nearby. 

The real treasures here, though, are the incredible relics recovered from deep inside Wat Mahathat and Wat Ratchaburana - a glittering array of golden and bejewelled knick-knacks reminiscent of the treasures of the pharaohs. Amazing stuff, and a great way to lend some context to what we'd seen elsewhere in town.

After all this, like us you'll probably be quite hungry. A nice place for a spot of lunch is Malakor, on the corner opposite Wat Ratchaburana. This was a recommendation from our guest house, and it was only upon climbing up the stairs to its charming wooden deck area that I realised I'd actually eaten here before several years ago on a previous visit. Cheap and tasty, both times.

Whilst there's plenty to see on the island itself, I'd urge you to go a little further afield, if only to see the amazing Wat Phanan Choeng. Reached by another short ferry journey from the south-east of the island, this still-working temple serves as a vibrant counterpoint to the ruins elsewhere. 

A colourful array of fascinating merit-making activities take place at this sprawling complex - covering statues in gold leaf, shaking fortune sticks at the various shrines, stapling notes to the 'money tree' - but the undisputed star of the show is the central buddha image, an immense, gleaming, 19-metre high statue, some 700 years old, that dominates the main hall.

We were lucky enough to arrive whilst a ceremony involving 'dressing' this biggest of buddhas was taking place, and watched enthralled as huge lengths of bright orange cloth were folded, distributed amongst the gathered crowd, and draped over their heads before being thrown to helpers standing on the statue's lap and hauled up his chest. A truly staggering sight.

On the cycle back, we had hoped to sample the local snack that some of the guidebooks recommend - Roti Saimai, a kind of candyfloss-filled pancake. However, this seems to be rather hard to buy in less than wholesale quantities, with the stalls only offering sacks of the stuff large enough to rot a whole family's teeth. One stall-holder, though, took pity on our attempts to buy a smaller quantity and rolled us a couple of individual ones, for which she would accept no payment in return! It's delicious stuff, but I'm quite glad we didn't buy a whole sack, as we'd surely have eaten ourselves sick on it.

And so, our appetites unspoiled, we headed out for dinner - ending up at Old Place, on the river near the ferry crossing from the station. This proved to be a great choice, a truly family business where we ate a number of delicious dishes, each served by a different member of the family, on a pleasant wooden deck overlooking the river.

Particular highlights were the seafood, both the amazingly-fresh squid, and the sumptuous prawn red curry proudly served to us by the youngest of the family with a little assistance from his big brother. Suitably well fed, we could just about manage the short walk back to Soi 2 for a final drink, this time at Chang House, run by seemingly the hardest-working man in Ayutthaya, who was more than willing to entertain us with his conversation in between leaping up to charm the backpackers into his establishment.

And so to bed. We'd managed to fit so much in during our short stay that we felt happy to head home in the morning (how strange, to be calling Bangkok 'home' now!), after one last quick temple visit - all the more pleasurable in the early morning before the coaches arrive and you can have it to yourself, apart from the dogs that appear to think they own the place.

Ayutthaya makes for a great weekend away from Bangkok. It would be worth the trip alone for the amazing historical sights on offer, but really it's enjoyable for much more than that. It's just the right size to spend a couple of days exploring, an easy journey out of the city, and has a genuine, easy-going charm to it that makes pedalling round its treasures and relaxing at its bars an absolute pleasure. We will surely be back.