Lopburi

We caught another slow, cheap train to Lopburi, though the green, green rice fields, stretching out as far as the eye could see, interspersed by fruit trees, villages, temples, rivers, canals and wild wetlands. Raised roads ran straight, a few feet above the fields.

Lopburi is one of Thailand’s oldest cities though we do not know exactly when it was first built. In the tenth century the Khmer empire absorbed it, destroying most of the buildings and creating the city that remains today in the form of scattered ruins. Lopburi became a frontier town for the Khmer empire and rose to prominence as a trading centre. However as the Sukothai empire grew in importance, Lopburi declined, until the Ayuthaya period, when it became the second capital of Siam.

What is left of Lopburi is much smaller than Ayuthaya and the ruins fewer and smaller, so not surrounded by beautiful parkland and waterways but just rising up, unexpectedly in the middle of the town, beside the railway tracks and in front of the train station.

The town is infested with monkeys, which the locals keep at bay with electric wiring and metals bars in front of their windows. Everywhere there are signs warning tourists NOT to feed the monkeys, but as we passed one of the temples, we saw a group of tourists feeding the monkeys.

In the evening we found lights in the trees inside the palace grounds, where a very large group of school children were rehearsing a show on a brightly coloured stage. In another part of the palace grounds, dozens of stage carpenters were busy building scenery: cardboard houses, battlements, a sailing ship, waves. . .