Khao Yai is meant to be one of the best places to spot wildlife in Thailand, although possibly not with the King’s birthday long weekend crowds! We enjoyed the jungle though with walking and kayaking on the lake. Then it was time to return to public transport and visit the ruined temples of Ayutthaya, the old capital of Thailand – before the Burmese attacked and burned it…
Best known as the site of the Bridge on the River Kwai, there’s a whole load of history here. There are also caves filled with crystals and bats, forests and cascades of waterfalls making this a pretty great place to visit. Especially when you stumble across a random festival!
The Land of Smiles. It’s certainly very different to Myanmar! We spent our first days in the national parks to the south west of Bangkok, looking for elephants, monkeys and birds, and doing quite a bit of caving too.
Not the best ending to our time in Myanmar, we didn’t really enjoy Yangon that much (pagoda fatigue?? and the heat) and Inle was rather blighted with illness – I guess travellers gut was inevitable at some point. Still, the Lake is pretty, and we found a crazy cave monastery to explore so it wasn’t all bad!
We had four days to explore this massive site, home to over 2,000 pagodas. Perhaps the momst famous of Myanmar’s sites, the area was more touristy than we had been used to, but with our e-bikes we escaped most of it and had some of our best days in Myanmar here.
We don’t love cities, so only planned to spend a couple of days here in the capital. There’s a lot to see here though, with three old capitals and the main one all displaying ancient pagodas, surrounded by monasteries and with the amazing Ubein bridge to explore.