Sure, you can visit the ancient Thai capital of Ayutthaya on a day trip from Bangkok, but this doesn’t do the ruins justice. You end up spending just a few hours seeing the ruins, often during the hottest time of day. If you spend the night instead, you can time it better and also see the stupas all lit up at night, which is gorgeous.

What is Ayutthaya?

This was the capital of Thailand during one of its glory periods, from 1350 to 1767. It reached a population of around 300,000 and was one of the world’s most prosperous trading centers. It was sacked by the Burmese and the government figures who survived high-tailed it to what’s now Bangkok. The former capital of Sukothai is more serene and the monuments don’t have a modern city smack up next to them, but it’s much harder to get there. Ayutthaya is just a couple hours from Bangkok and you can explore the bulk of it on foot after arrival.

What you see are the remains of the former government headquarters and the monasteries, with the most famous image being the three large aligned stupas you see on one of the banknotes and the nearby Buddha head enclosed by roots that seems to show up in every magazine story about the place. It’s on an island surrounded by three rivers and follows much of the same grid pattern laid out originally. The actual archaeological park is broken up into multiple parts as the city grew up around the ruins over the years without much zoning or care. Sometimes you see ruins right in the back yard of a commercial business or house.  It’s bizarre, but at least it’s easy to hop a cab to the next spot if you’re getting tired of walking. Many of the sites are free; those that aren’t charge 50 baht (about $1.70), less for kids.

Getting to Ayutthaya

Ways to make the short trip from Bangkok include a direct minibus from Victoria Monument for a few dollars, a regular bus from the northern Mo Chit station for about $2, an expensive tourist boat tour, or the train. The last option is the best for most budget travelers as it’s quick and easy to get to the central Hua Lamphong railway station from wherever you’re staying and there’s no hassle bringing all your luggage. From Khao San Road it’s a short taxi or tuk-tuk ride, from many other hotel zones you can reach it on the city metro. Once there, an English-speaking helper will probably appear to help you buy an air-conditioned second class ticket for $8, but if you’re already accustomed to the Thai heat, a third-class ticket (no assigned seats) is a mere 15 baht—around 50 cents.

Once you arrive at your destination, you still have to get to where you’re staying. Ayutthaya is much larger than it looks on most maps, so you might have to suck it up and pay a few bucks for a taxi. Otherwise, from the train station you take a ferry across the river and start hoofing it.

Hotels and Hostels in Ayutthaya

The first time I visited I stayed in a cheap guesthouse a quick hop from some of the ruins. These run $6 to $12 for a fan-cooled double, with a single room or hostel bed as low as $4. Try Hostelbookers or Hostelworld to book ahead, or just head to the cheap hotel zone where they’re clustered in your guidebook or app and start looking around.

If you’re on a mid-range budget, hotels here are a great deal. We scored an air-conditioned  triple room in a large hotel with a swimming pool for less than $40, breakfast included. You can check a meta site like Hotels Combined, but honestly you’re usually going to find the best deals in Southeast Asia on one site: Agoda. They’ve got the deepest inventory and usually the best rates.

Getting Around in Ayutthaya

Again, this place is bigger than it looks on a map and getting from one set of ruins to another can be a long slog. Carry plenty of water or be prepared to pay up for it. You can get around faster on a bike, which you can rent from most hotels or a local shop for $1 to $2.50 a day. It’s easy to flag down a tuk-tuk or bicycle rickshaw, or a group can hire a tuk-tuk for $7 to $10 an hour depending on your bargaining skills. This is especially worthwhile at night to get a quick tour of the lit up ruins.

Want to get around in a unique fashion? You can take an elephant ride through a circuit past several sets of ruins. It’ll cost you $15 or so, but when else are you going to have the chance to ride past 15th-century buildings on…an elephant? I stayed behind, but my companions went for a lumber and loved it.

We were heading out to Cambodia shortly and had to get back to the capital. Otherwise, it would have been nice to spend two nights here. Much mellower than Bangkok and there are a lot of ruins off the island that we didn’t get to see. Another time…

For more info on Thailand’s former capital, visit the UNESCO World Heritage page for the site.

It’s time to take a break from serious travel advice again and just have a laugh, this time from Thailand. Sure, I take lots of scenic photos when I travel, but I revel in the silliness even more sometimes.

First up, there are a lot of things you’re not supposed to do in a Bangkok taxi cab. Some of them may make plenty of sense to foreigners, some may produce a scratching of the head.

That spiky thing, if you haven’t been to this part of the world, is a very smelly fruit called a durian.  The throwing up guy is kind of funny though because really, has anyone ever thrown up in a cab on purpose?

This other one is a bit stranger. No mooning is funny in itself, but a dog with sunglasses? Does that mean no blind dogs that need another seeing eye dog? And is that last one just a cigarette…or some kind of drug inhalation device?

Next up, no, I did not take a photo of meditating monks all gathered together. These are creepy lifelike statues of (apparently) well-known Thai monks you can buy as souvenirs and put on your shelf.

It’s been a rough few weeks in the usual powder kegs of the world as an obscure amateur video that poked fun at a certain religion’s founder sparked riots among the faithful. We should all give thanks that the Buddhists are so much more level-headed.

I traveled through Southeast Asia with a pair of Pickpocket Proof Pants from Clothing Arts. I knew I’d be navigating crowded markets, walking dark streets at night, and visiting sites frequented by clueless tourists. So I figured there would be more than a few pickpockets about looking for an easy target. Still, I was perplexed by this sign I encountered several times at the Grand Palace in Bangkok.

So…all the pickpockets that might be milling about are foreigners, not locals? How did they all get in there? Did they pay the hefty $13 admission fee like the rest of us, expecting to turn a big enough profit to make up for it? They must be very successful if so…

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I just spent three weeks in Southeast Asia with my family, which involved lots of hotel hopping. In Bangkok though we split our time between a hotel near KSR and an apartment in a real Thai neighborhood off Sukhumvit.

We rented it through an ad partner of mine on another site: Wimdu. You may not have heard of them, but they’re similar to AirBnB here in the U.S., with a wider range of inventory in Europe and Asia. (See their short back story here.) When I pulled up the Bangkok apartment listings for the dates we were looking at, there were 49 places to choose from. If were had been looking further out, we could have seen potentially 100+ for rent. These range from a spare room in someone’s condo for $10 to a 3BR 1,500 square foot apartment in a prime location for $164 a night. In between are a lot of fantastic deals—half list for $50 a night or less.

Of course you can get a hotel room for that in Bangkok too, so why go the apartment route? For us, the space difference was dramatic. We rented a 2BR apartment with a big kitchen/living room and full fridge. For about what we paid for a regular hotel room before, we got literally four times the space. The two photos here are of the apartment we had, which is listed here.

Our neighbors in the high-rise were professional Thais and families, which was a far cry from the tourist zone we had been in before, plus we were right off the modern, air-conditioned Sky Train, which took us to the city’s crazy shopping malls (Terminal 21 and CentralWorld) and points beyond.

How Wimdu Works

The reservation part is easy. You pick a place, reserve it, then the host gets back to you to confirm. You can pay by Paypal or credit card, but the host doesn’t actually get the money until 24 hours after you’ve checked in. So they’ve got a strong incentive to make sure you get the keys okay and you’re happy. If something goes wrong, Wimdu insures you automatically. Here’s how it works, in text and video.

The owner’s dad met us at the agreed time and got us hooked up with fingerprint access for the building’s front door (a first for me and got an exclamation of “cooool” from the daughter). He showed us how things worked, handed us the keys, and we were set. Towels and basic toiletries were provided and the A/C cranked. My wife and I enjoyed having a full bedroom to ourselves—a rarity on this trip—and it was nice to have a table where we could eat.

I would definitely use Wimdu again, especially if I were going to their most popular destinations, where the apartment prices are an even better bargain compared to hotels, like Amsterdam, London, or New York City. With the latter you also have the advantage that you could get a place in Brooklyn, where hotels are pretty scarce.

Just be advised there are two versions of this site: one with “.com” on the end and one with “.co.uk” on the end. They’re identical, but the first shows prices in dollars, the second in pounds or euros depending on where you logged in. To switch the currency, look for the teeny tiny text links at the top right and make the switch. (You can change languages too if English is not your first.) Then you can sort by several methods, including price and distance from the center.

See more at Wimdu.com (USA/Canada) or the main Wimdu site for Europeans.

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Khao San Road has long been like the slutty girl from college you know you should avoid. Half the guys you know have slept with her. She smokes, she’s loud when she gets drunk, she dresses badly, everything taken to excess.

Oh, but she’s always fun…and it’s just so darn easy.

When I first visited Bangkok, Thailand in the early 1990s, Khao San Road was already well-established as the backpacker crossroads of the world. We ended up back there a few more times on our first round-the-world trip and ran into some of the same people each time. It was crazy, crowded, and already derided as a “travel ghetto.” Tuk-tuk driver scams were rampant, the food wasn’t very imaginative, and the cheap guesthouses were nothing to get excited about. It was the place with the greatest density of what travelers wanted and needed though, all within a few minutes walk.

Pretty much all of this is still true, but on a larger scale. It’s now the Khao San Road Area because it has grown like a blob and eaten up several surrounding streets. We stayed at Villa Cha Cha hotel, whose entrance is three blocks away, but the back side of it has a bar and restaurant that’s now in the heart of the action, open 24 hours a day. (Nice hotel, by the way, if you’re a mid-range traveler. We paid around $50 per night for three, with A/C, Wi-Fi, hot showers, fridge, and a nice swimming pool. They let us check in really early too after we flew all the way from the U.S.)

Of course you still have to go through six or eight taxis to find one that will use the meter in this area and yes, you can still buy a fake diploma or student card. You don’t need an ID to buy alcohol and one place even has this fact on all the staff t-shirts.

There are some new developments that seem a bit strange. The massage places now spill into the street: apparently some people don’t mind getting a rubdown lying next to dozens of others while a parade of people walks by. There are more chain restaurants and air conditioned shops. More street stalls jammed into limited real estate.

KSR is a microcosm of what has changed in the travel world in general. The few Asians we used to see before (almost always Japanese) are far more numerous, with Koreans, Chinese, and even Vietnamese backpackers on the move. There are flashpackers trying in vain to move down the crowded cart-filled streets with hard shell rolling suitcases instead of backpacks. You see parties of four all playing with their iPhones instead of talking to each other or meeting the people at the next table. And overall, there’s just more money being spent.

I’m one of those people now, the kind I used to look at as “those tourists” who had more money than time. Now I have three weeks and a bigger budget, so I’m making the most of it. We spent a few nights in an apartment on the Sky Train line off Sukumvit Road, visiting malls and mingling with the crowds staying at Hyatts and Sofitels. But it wasn’t the same. Despite all its flaws, its ugliness, and its sprawling madness, Khao San Road is just, well, more fun. I shouldn’t keep returning to her, but she’s just so easy…

Oh yeah, and you’re a short hop away from all this:

Today I board a plane for Bangkok. I’ve been on a plane to Bangkok many times, but not since I had a child many years ago. Now it’ time for me to research the region for the 4th edition of my book and I’ve got a magazine assignment in Hanoi. So I’m taking my daughter and wife to Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

I try to write for both backpackers and “mid-range” travelers on this Cheapest Destinations Blog because good values are independent of budget levels. Some destinations are just a better deal all around. Including these three.

The first time I went though, I and my now-wife were true shoestring backpackers. Our budget was $15 a day for a year after flights and we stuck to it. We circled the globe two more times and raised the budget a bit, but we were still mostly staying in cheap guesthouses, cold mandi bucket showers and all. Sweating buckets under a mosquito net, the smell of burning coils in our nostrils.

This time it’s a family trip, so not only will I be looking at higher prices due to the passage of time and these countries’ growing prosperity, but also we’re willing to pay for more comfort. So instead of reporting on the grotty windowless room I got for ten bucks, I’ll be posting pictures of my $50 room with a fridge, A/C, and a pool outside. (If you ever want to see a kid in a cranky mood, vacation for weeks without staying in a place with a swimming pool.)

We’ll be embracing many things I would have avoided before: Bangkok’s crazy shopping malls, VIP seats at the movie theater, cheesy dance shows, a first class sleeping berth, nice taxis now and then. But I know they’ll be a great value, so stay tuned!

[Photo by Perceptive Travel blogger and former Bangkok resident Brian Spencer. Click on the pic for a fun Bangkok story.]