Ayutthaya

Ayutthaya sits about eighty kilometres north of Bangkok, close enough that most people come for the day and far enough that the day is a long one. Trains run frequently and take an hour and a half to two hours. Since 2023 they leave from Krung Thep Aphiwat Central Terminal in Bang Sue rather than the old Hua Lamphong station, a change that still catches travellers out. Third class is cheap, slow and open-windowed; the air-conditioned second-class services are more comfortable.

By road the drive is ninety minutes without traffic and considerably more with it, so leave the city early. A car makes sense if you want to take in the Bang Pa-In summer palace on the way. Once you arrive, the distances between temples are short but not walkable in the heat, so hire bicycles or take a tuk-tuk by the hour, which is the usual local arrangement.

The historical park itself is open ground and free to walk through. It is the individual temple enclosures that charge. Most major sites ask fifty baht per person from foreign visitors, and a combined ticket at two hundred and twenty baht covers six of them, among them Wat Mahathat, Wat Ratchaburana, Wat Phra Si Sanphet and Wat Chaiwatthanaram. That ticket stays valid for thirty days, which helps if you split the visit across two mornings. Smaller sites cost less, and several of the best, including the open-air reclining Buddha at Wat Lokaya Sutha, cost nothing at all.

Ticket booths take cash only and small notes are appreciated. Gates generally open at half past eight and close between five and six in the evening, though a few of the riverside temples are floodlit afterwards and worth a second look from outside the fence.

This is the honest drawback of Ayutthaya, and it is better planned around than discovered at eleven in the morning. The ruins are brick and laterite on open ground, the trees that once stood among them were never replanted, and there is almost no shade anywhere in the central zone. In March, April and May the temperature sits in the high thirties with humidity to match, and the brick radiates the heat back at you from below.

The answer is straightforward. Start at opening time, be finished by half past eleven, spend the middle of the day indoors at the Chao Sam Phraya National Museum or over a long lunch, then come back at four for the light. Carry more water than seems necessary, wear a hat with a brim rather than a cap, and treat sunscreen as equipment. Anyone staying overnight gets the ruins at dawn, which is the best hour here.

Two shapes dominate. The tall corn-cob tower is a prang, a Khmer form that the early Ayutthaya kings borrowed from Angkor to make a point about who had inherited what. The bell on a square base is a chedi, the Sinhalese Buddhist form that arrived later and eventually won. Noticing which shape a temple uses tells you roughly when it was built and which way the court was looking at the time.

The missing heads are not weathering. When the Burmese took the city in 1767, after a siege of more than a year, they burned it and stripped the gold from the images; later, heads were removed by looters for sale abroad. Nothing serious was rebuilt, because the surviving court moved downriver and founded Bangkok instead. You are not walking through a ruin that decayed slowly, but a capital that ended in a single year.

Bang Pa-In lies twenty minutes south: a royal summer palace rebuilt in the nineteenth century in a mixture of Thai, Chinese, Italianate and Gothic styles that sounds like a mess and is oddly coherent in person. It makes an easy stop on the drive up from Bangkok.

Lopburi, an hour north, was Ayutthaya’s second capital under King Narai and is now better known for the macaques that have taken over its Khmer ruins and a good part of the old town. They are entertaining and genuinely not to be fed. Further north again, Sukhothai preserves an older, gentler capital from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, laid out among ponds and lawns and best covered by bicycle. Sukhothai charges separately for each of its zones, and the central zone is the one to prioritise if time is short.

Ayutthaya is a place of working monasteries as much as archaeology, and monks live at several sites inside the park. Shoulders and knees covered is the safe default, and it is also the sensible way to dress in this heat. Shoes come off inside any building still in religious use. Climbing on the ruins is prohibited and the rule is enforced, and posing in front of a Buddha image with your back to it is considered disrespectful — a sign at Wat Mahathat says as much.

On arrival formalities: Thailand reduced its visa exemption to 30 days on 15 September 2026 for the 60 nationalities that still qualify, replacing the previous 60 days, and every arriving traveller must file the free Thailand Digital Arrival Card at tdac.immigration.go.th within the 72 hours before landing. Bring cash for the temple gates, because cards are not accepted.