Breakfast at the hotel and check out. We take one of those pink cabs to the station.

The flats in the flower beds between the lanes are in their pots. They are watered by a passing tanker truck.

The tickets cost 60 baht, about a euro and a half, for four people in economy class, the only class on this train.

The benches are hard plastic and just not wide enough for 4 European buttocks.

The train rumbles for the first hour through Bangkok’s dingy neighborhoods. Along the tracks, people live in makeshift homes. Like along the water, a mini-society of its own exists along the tracks.

We stop several more times in the city at traffic crossings. Automatic crossings with priority for the train still need to be addressed here.

The train occasionally stops at seemingly random places, where someone gets on or off.

On the outskirts of Bangkok, we drive for miles past enormous structures. Giant multi-story concrete skeletons, tens of meters high, form the palisades for a new highway or a huge electrified rail network.

At Ayutthaya station, no cabs or tuk-tuks waiting for tourists. A kind woman points us to a nearby temple where a few tuk-tuks await. The suitcases are piled up against the back wall of the tuk-tuk, and there is even room left on the benches. The driver still has to make a phone call to recognize the address of our hotel.

The hotel is a building on stilts with rooms and a large living area on the second floor. There are also rooms in an outbuilding.

After taking up residence in the hotel, we stroll to the center, which turns out to be just a little too far away in this heat. We walk through Ayutthaya’s old park, which is full of ruined temples.

Further on, it is a place where tourists can ride around on elephants. That is not at all good for the elephants. So we are not going to do that.

In the center, we eat at a little restaurant along the street. Everything seems to be in Thai but a nice woman pulls out a menu in English anyway. The food is excellent.

We take a tuk-tuk back to the hotel.

Call for evening prayers from the mosque across the river. A few hundred meters away, a Catholic church.

Jungle sounds from the overgrown backyards behind the hotel.