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.

Angkor Wat has always been my one big regret. When I circled the globe three times in my younger days, there was always some good reason to avoid Cambodia. A coup going on, political asassinations, overpriced flights, potholes the size of cars on the one road from Bangkok…

So while we were in the neighborhood plenty—in Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam—we never crossed that border.

Many years later, I’ve recitified my main regret. I spent two and a half days exploring a couple dozen temples and sites in the Angkor Wat region, this time with the daughter along that didn’t even exist back then. So while she might not have been as jazzed as us about walking around ruins in the hot sun, I think she’ll realize how cool it was to be here later.

The World’s Greatest Historic Site

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say this is the greatest site of them all, the bucket list contender that makes Machu Picchu and even Petra seem small in comparison. Sure, Luxor undoubtedly was pretty impressive in its day and Teotihuacan certainly awed anyone who came trotting down that 2km entrance road. But the sheer vastness of Angkor dwarfs most others.

The main complex alone is inside a wall that stretches around 203 acres. That most famous part was built in the 12th century, but the whole Angkor complex was in building mode from the 800s to the 1400s. The entire complex was the biggest city of its day and at its peak probably covered a staggering 390 square miles, or 1,000 square kilometers. To put this in perspective, Tikal was probably between 100 and 150 square kilometers. Teotihuacan was around 36.

The main Angkor Wat temple is just the beginning, so trying to do it all in one day is going to be frantic and incomplete. If you do more than one day, you can get beyond just the main complex, Angkor Thom, and Bayom. Here’s a site with some good maps to give you an idea. Here’s a good story on some temples on the periphery of Angkor.

Some of the outlying ones are just as impressive, though don’t expect the crowds to let up. There were loads of tourists wherever we went, especially Asian ones that come in by the busload and follow the flag. In Ta Prohm we spent most of our time waiting for people to stop posing for photos in front of things to actually see them. At one spot there was a line 20 people deep for posing shots.

What It’s Going to Cost You

There’s still a monopoly on flights from Bangkok, so they’re an overpriced $200 one-way. We went overland for about $72 for the three of us: by A/C bus to the Thai border then a $48 taxi to Siem Reap.

A 3-day pass to all the Angkor Complex ruins is only $40, which is pretty good in international major site terms, and you can use it any three days over the course of a week. (A one-day pass is $20.) We hired a tuk-tuk driver through our hotel that was $14 for the whole day, coming and going on our own schedule. That worked out well and it was fun to see the walls of the temples as we buzzed along. The third day we left our daughter in the hotel and biked out to the main complex, getting there at about 7 am. This turned out to be a good time.

You’d have to be in pretty good shape to do a whole day on bikes though as the distances are quite far and the roads quite pitted in some places. Some times of the year, it rains each afternoon as well. If you’re on a budget, it might make sense to rent a bike one day ($2-$3) and then get a tuk-tuk or motobike driver (you can’t rent one) for the outlying temples.

I’ve said many times that as far as tourism goes, there are really two Mexicos: the American resort Mexico and the other Mexico. Even though Zora O’Neill makes some good points in Cancun is the new Tulum, they’re night and day in terms of prices, atmosphere, history, and culture.

I’m living in Guanajuato, which gets huge numbers of domestic tourists, but only a trickle of foreign ones—half of those here studying Spanish. (It’s only $60-$120 per week for 2-4 hours daily at Escuela Mexicana). But this place looks like travelers’ central compared to another UNESCO World Heritage city a few hours away: Zacatecas.

I went there last year and posted a slideshow from the amazing Rafael Coronel Mask Museum. I’ve been waiting for the chance to take my family there and see more of the city, so we went during the week between Christmas and New Year’s for a vacation. One more pic from that museum top left—there are so many great images there it’s hard to resist snapping away.

With a few days, we were able to leisurely check out a few more museums, which were all excellent and well-maintained, despite admission fees of $2 or $3. The Museo Pedro Coronel is an art museum housed in a 17th century building and it’s filled with work from lots of big names—like Picasso, Miro, and Kandisky—but also has rooms devoted to the founder’s collections of Japanese paintings, African masks, and art from all over Asia. Quite impressive.

The Museo Zacatecano is a hodge-podge of collections with no real uniting theme, from pottery to paintings to furniture, but it has a fantastic collection of beaded and embroidered artwork from the Huichol people. There’s one section of the museum that attempts to explain the wild colors and trippy images in the work by duplicating the experience of being high on peyote. I’m sure the real thing is better than these lighting effects, but a cool idea anyway.

A must-do experience in Zacatecas is riding a cable car across the city, from one mountain to the next. Don’t worry, the whole gondola structure was made in Switzerland. And if it gets too windy, they shut it down. If you ride from the station up the hill from the center and then walk down the other side, you get some nice panoramic views the whole way and a bit of high-altitude exercise as well.

There’s much more in this centuries-old colonial city that used to be a silver mining city and it’s well-worth hanging out here for a few days. The food is good and cheap, the streets are great for strolling, and hotels are reasonably priced. It’s at close to 7,500 feet in altitude, so it never gets very hot.

We were there for three nights and could count the total of other gringos in the center on two hands. Then we went to San Luis Potosi and there were even fewer. If you get tired of sharing the sites with busloads of your fellow countrymen, it’s not hard to change all that in Mexico. Just go inland.

The Eiffel Tower, the Vatican, St. Marks Square, Tower of London, Ankor Wat, Machu Picchu, the Great Pyramids of Egypt, the Taj Mahal, Chichen Itza, the Great Wall of China: the images of these places are etched in our minds. We’ve seen a hundred pictures of each before we even hit an age where we can travel on our own. Some have been major landmarks for hundreds of years, while others went from zero to sixty (in thousands of visitors per month) in a few decades.

Many of these places have lost much of their magic because they have been loved to death and are swarming like a summer beehive. Ask people what their biggest disappointment was in their travels and it will often be one of these famous monuments. There are strategies (time of day, time of year, paying more for special access) that can mitigate the crowds, but here are some “path of less resistance options.” All of them are located in The World’s Cheapest Destinations.

Sukothai in Thailand

The sites around Bangkok are almost always crowded and Ayutthaya is better if you spend the night since it gets busloads of Bangkok day-trippers at other times. Sukothai is much further off the beaten track though, so you’ve got to make it your destination to see it’s serene collections of Buddhist monuments and temples. [Flickr photo by gemma.amor]

Borobudur and Prambanan in Indonesia

These two sites on the island of Java near Yogyakarta aren’t exactly unknowns and you’ll probably share your day with lots of local schoolkids, but reality is that Indonesia just doesn’t get all that many international tourists outside of Bali, so these two spectacular sites—one Buddhist, one Hindu—seldom get really packed with people. One of the real highlights of my travels in Southeast Asia. [Borobudur Flickr photo by Victor Kaposi]

Dilwari Marble Jain Temples of Mt. Abu in India

I’ve been top to bottom in India and seen a hundred amazing things, but this one blew me away because I had heard so little about it. These incredible marble temples are off the radar for most tourists, even though in lesser countries they would be the main attraction on every tourist brochure. Built mostly between the 11th and 13th century, they display an intricate craftsmanship and attention to detail that is simply mind-boggling. (And unless things have changed lately, admission is free. ) [Flickr photo by w3p706]

Uxmal in Mexico

More impressive than Chichen Itza but with 1/10 the crowds, this great Maya site is easy to reach from Merida, the capital of the Yucatan state. Because you can’t do it on a day trip from the beaches around Cancun, most visitors are those staying in Merida—a great city that doesn’t get all that many tourists. Spend the night at one of the hotels right outside the gates and have the place to yourself part of the day. (For an alternative to Chichen Itza you can reach from Cancun, check out Ek Balam.)

Guanajuato and Zacatecas in Mexico

These two central Mexican cities a few hours apart are both UNESCO World Heritage locations, but nearly all of the visitors to Guanajuato and Zacatecas (pictured above) are domestic. So there are crowds in the summer and on school breaks, yes, but they’ll all be speaking Spanish and they’ll disappear the rest of the year. A tourist town for Mexicans is priced very differently than a tourist town for Americans too: just compare hotel rates in these two places to those of Gringo town San Miguel de Allende.

Choquequirao in Peru

Some places are not crowded because you have to really want to get there. Choquequirao is probably the largest set of Inca ruins that exist in South America, but the only way to reach them is on a long multi-day hiking and camping trip. [Flickr photo by Roubiceck]

There are plenty more where these came from. Got a favorite mind-blowing site of your own? Add it to the comments! Then subscribe to this Cheapest Destinations blog.