thailand 1/21: ANCIENT CITY

I’d dined the previous night with Chuck, his parents, and his beautiful sister and her boyfriend. It seemed out of place to discuss my bearings (paltry, but comfortable) and my plans for the rest of the week (none to speak of) too explicitly, so we talked blandly of business schools and slandered Amherst instead. It was awkward. I decided then that I’d had enough of Bangkok, and chose, on Chuck’s recommendation, to take an overnight bus to Krabi the following day.
Photographs in a Japanese brochure found in the hostel lobby of ruined, cyclopean stone visages leering out from behind savage vines locked in the daytime itinerary. I packed my bag, and, brimming with expectation and purpose, boarded a bus for ‘ANCIENT CITY’.
The bus broke down about forty minutes outside of Bangkok. I tentatively (and correctly – a miracle!) made the transfer to a ‘local bus’ (an Isuzu cab with a couple of benches nailed down to the flatbed), by lamely flashing my brochure at anything with wheels. When I dismounted (ANCIENT CITY was a rolling stop), I was embarrassed to realize that I’d grossly misunderstood the brochure. For whatever reason, it hadn’t occurred to me until I stood before a billboard advertising parking rates that I wasn’t about to enter some time-capsuled jungle to spy upon pygmy-run pagodas. ANCIENT CITY, I realized too late, was a theme park; an idyll of replicas crafted by a meticulous (and insane) amateur archeologist and scaled to 75%. The park was in the shape of Thailand.
Miracle the second was that ANCIENT CITY didn’t charge admission on Mondays. I paid 50b for a rickety, tin bicycle, which rattled of death, and whose obstinate front wheel threatened death at every turn. I rode, at first timorously, and eventually more boldly, along the still, mold waters and moats, past stone carnations of myth and deity which must have been terrifying in their original, gigantic glory, but here where only impressive when captured in contextual composition on film:

There were, additionally, stone dioramas depicting Thai fables. Beautiful, drowned princesses who fled, in vain, on the arms of plucky, unlucky true loves from jealous, fantastical murderers. I liked stories like that.
When I left ANCIENT CITY by local bus two hours later, I was at peace with the world. The pumpkin fisherman pants clung to my legs with sweat, and I'd essentially toured the set of the Indiana Jones trilogy on bikeback, but it'd been a slow, satisfying way to spend the afternoon. I didn't believe in boredom. Best of all, I discovered that the endpoint of my bus was the junction at which I could charter a coach to Krabi.