Visiting Muang Boran (The Ancient City)
By Lauren Gerzina & Justin Hayes
Temple Replicas, Golf Carts, and Thanksgiving
Thanks to our YouTube vloggers, we found out about a fairly off-the-beat-and-path attraction in Bangkok called Muang Boran or The Ancient City. It is essentially a large, outdoor museum built by a wealthy philanthropist that has 3:1 or 4:1 scale replicas of famous temples and palaces throughout Thailand. In fact, the entire park is laid out in the shape of Thailand with temple replicas corresponding to their location in the country.
The best part about it was that you could rent a golf cart to drive around and check things out at your leisure.
So after breakfast, we hopped on the BTS train (essentially Bangkok’s above-ground metro line) heading south. If you don’t want to pay for a relatively expensive Grab from the middle of the city, the best way to get there is to take the BTS to one of the southern-most stops and then call a Grab to take you the rest of the way.
Once we arrived, we bought our tickets, rented the golf cart, then headed inside, not really sure what to expect. Immediately, we were very impressed by how large the park was and how many things there were to see. In about 3 hours, we were able to at least stop by most of the temples in the park and go into many of them.
The strangest attraction there was called the ghost museum. It was essentially a mini-museum that talked about traditional Thai ghost stories. We didn’t really know what was going on because all of the placards explaining things were written in Thai, but they had several graphic and disturbing models portraying each of the ghost stories. We found it amusing despite having no idea what was going on.
For the most part, the park was very well kept up and impressive. The only disappointing thing was that many of the coolest attractions – such as an old boat called a Junk, a temple on the water with hundreds of Buddha statues, and the floating market – were all closed. It was unclear if they were being renovated or needed repairs or if we were just visiting in an off-season so the park wasn’t in full-swing. Regardless, we both felt that it was still worth the trip.
On our way back, we got off a few stops early to check out a restaurant Justin had found called Theera Bakery that had gluten-free options. Justin got pork ribs with rice and really delicious sauteed spinach and Lauren got a pasta dish. The best part was that they had several gluten/dairy/nut-free cakes and desserts. We ordered a banana cream cake that was delicious and reminded Justin of banana pudding. The chocolate crust was also very good. We also got a chocolate cookie and another banana cake to take back with us for later.
When we got back to the hotel, we spent a few hours relaxing in the room and around 5ish, decided to go hang out in the executive lounge until our dinner reservation at 6:30pm in another restaurant in the hotel. A few days earlier, Lauren found out that one of the hotel restaurants – since it was a Marriot – was serving a Thanksgiving dinner. So we made a reservation because we both knew we would enjoy having a little taste of home for the holiday. The only part we didn’t love was that the dinner was going to cost us $65 USD/person.
Well, we quickly cancelled our reservation when we went to the executive lounge and found out that they, too, were serving Thanksgiving dinner, complete with turkey and a few sides that Justin could eat. We also liked that they labeled everything with allergens. We chilled up in the lounge for a couple of hours, each of us enjoying a couple of heaping’s of food. We worked on the blog and uploading some photos, among other computer-oriented tasks.
After dinner, we headed back to the room for the evening.
