Road Trip Central Thailand, August 2026

Driving out of Bangkok towards Ayutthaya you encounter mile upon mile of ribbon development along major motorway-style roads. Two contradicting thoughts occur at once, ‘This looks familiar,’ and ‘I’ve never been here before.’ Both are actually true in the sense that you have definitely never driven on this motorway before because it is relatively new, and also these endless suburbs do indeed all look the same. ‘What’s this area called?’ beckons you to the screen in order to get your bearings, but the suburb name will likely leave you none the wiser.

Without google maps prompting you each time the highways spaghettify, which they do repeatedly to whisk traffic towards some satellite town or other: ‘Take the left or middle lane and slight left in 500 metres,’ ‘In 350 metres take the slip road and bear left to enter the frontage road before keeping right over the overpass,’ you’d never reach your destination. No time for ponderous driving either, as fellow road users all know these stretches well and are in a hurry to get to work. The screen prompt also sportingly tells you that police are up ahead in 2 minutes’ time – watch out, pick-up drivers! As you eventually pass Don Meuang, the old international airport, you remember just how far out it actually is. It can take an hour just to clear Bangkok’s suburbs if you are mixing it with going-to-work traffic; worse if it is home-time.

First stop is Ang Thong. Careful when you google places to stay or whatever, there are two Ang Thongs and the other one is the Mu Koh National Marine Park, off Koh Samui, an eleven-hour drive in the opposite direction. This one is far less glamorous, being a province just north of Bangkok. Not much on the agenda here really, just laying up on the way to Lopburi which looked a little less than inviting in terms of a two-day sojourn. Ang Thong does have some notable wats though, including Wat Pa Mok Worawihan which has the second largest reclining Buddha statue in Thailand.

Lopburi next up and with some foreboding. It has been on the back-burner, filed under ‘some other time’ seemingly forever. This was largely because of clips over the years of the macaque monkeys climbing all over sightseers, pulling their hair and stealing bags as they searched for food - teeth bared to warn off any thoughts of retaliation. Those, plus the videos of street battles being fought by huge troupes with hundreds of monkeys storming across the streets in and out of the traffic. (How could the monkeys tell who was on whose side?) Plus, the adjoining streets always looked so squalid – my mental thesaurus lined up words in advance, such as grimy, grubby and shabby. Small wonder then that Lopburi always induced a psychological swerve. Then I read that the authorities had cleared the place of monkeys during covid, leaving just the 150 or so to add a bit of colour for the tourists.

King Narai the Great circa 1666 had his palace in Lopburi and places of interest such as Phra Prang Sam Yot and Wat Phra Si Wattana feature Ayutthaya period prangs (towers) in fairly good condition. It is true that the adjacent streets are all shuttered up and do play host to the occasional small group of macaques, but the overall impression is one of tidiness - dilapidated but well-kept. I used to ruminate along the lines of, ‘Why don’t they do something about it?’ in reference to the monkeys and the run-down surroundings. Obviously, they have now. Away from the antiquities, Lopburi presents as a regular Thai town with all the usual car showrooms, Big C Super Centres and a Robinsons Mall. If you lived there, you would likely not take any notice of the historical sites, apart from navigating adjacent roundabouts to get to where you are going. As for the King’s former palace, the huge grounds are also home to the Somdet Phra Narai National Museum, whose displays celebrate evidence of settlement from 3,500 years back, but focus mainly on the Ayutthaya period (1351-1767).

On to Chai Nat where a couple of interesting wats are worth checking out. But to be fair, the main reason for stopping is so that we can arrive in Uthai Thani further north at the weekend when the walking street (Trok Rong Ya) market will be open. Chai Nat is on the Chao Phraya River which is in full spate at the moment (August): wide, brown and menacing. The riverside hotel is very much out of season, there being a case for rebranding it as a haunted house if you ask me.

On the way to Chai Nat there was an excellent find in Wat Sai. This small 400-year-old wat sits all alone on the Singburi side of the Chao Praya. The tiny single-entry hall has fought a losing battle with banyan tree trunks and roots to create a tableau on each wall worthy of far greater fame. If you google it, you get countless other ‘Wat Sai’s all over Thailand instead, so I count it as a very lucky find. The keeper was so surprised at getting visitors just after opening up (including a foreigner, no less) that he felt it necessary to give a six-part documentary speech about the history of the wat, possibly about the history of the world. He was so animated that I imagined him going home to his wife and bursting through the kitchen door, ‘Guess what happened at work today…’ Wat Sai is now one of my favourite wats ever, straight into my top ten out of nowhere!

Just south of Uthai Thani is the ‘Crystal Wat’ which dismisses the description of ‘iconic’ as a bit of an understatement. When you enter the main hall and turn 360 degrees you realise the scale of the house of glass – 100 metres long, actually. Pillars of diamond-shaped mirrors are interspersed with chandeliers and lights to create a fairyland for visitors as they make their way towards the gold Buddha statues at either end. Eventually, the sensation of being dazzled and dazed subsides, allowing you to take a seat and watch new arrivals experiencing the same bejewelled greeting. Imagine if this were your local wat; indeed, plenty of people bought their own camp chair to sit and mediate in such grand surroundings.

It was necessary to return the next day once it was clear that the site is massively bigger than at first realised, with more crystal marvels within the same grounds. Each new glittering temple interior had to be explored, and all required getting back into the car, such is the size of the place. It had rained overnight, so my clever plan of wearing socks with slip-ons for easy access to temples without the grubby-foot business, was thwarted. Not wishing to have wet socks due to the puddles on the outside steps led to socks-in-pockets and slip-skidding barefoot on the marble instead. I am willing to concede here and now that I am the right age to wear socks with sandals. Quite shameless about that one.

Uthai Thani is overlooked by Sakae Krang Hill – an actual hill! You can tackle the 449 steps to the top to see the temple, or drive up via a back road. (Raise your hand if you went by car, ahem!) The wat at the top has a large bell which was installed in 1900. It is said that those who didn’t ring the bell haven’t really visited Uthai Thani. I only read that after I got back to the hotel. Needless to say, I didn’t ring the bell. I’ll have to make do with my Schrödinger’s visit to Uthai Thani then.

Places like Ang Thong, Chai Nat and Uthai Thani are those that you normally jet past on the way to Chiang Mai, after all you are only a few hours into your ten-hour drive. Why would you stop, just as you are settling into a rhythm? To be fair, besides interesting wats, there isn’t much of a reason to stop, unless you are some kind of Thailand academic who can eke out points of historical interest from even the most mundane of settings. I would give Uthai Thani some credit though for having something like an older quarter with wooden houses (downstairs a concrete surround) and an agreeable walking street. The people also seem to be very open and willing to chat at the drop of a hat, curious as they are about such a rare occurrence – tourists! Several asked me if I was Dr Livingstone. I presume that’s what they were saying.

About that walking street which convenes on a Saturday; it is called Trok Rong Ya which translates as ‘Opium Den Alley’. Sounds dramatic, but that is exactly what it was while being the centre of opium trade amongst the Chinese riverside community. That is until 1977 when the Thai government banned opium. There is a small museum set to one side which showcases this claim to fame. As for the market, there is a good selection of food and clothes but little in the way of local craftware. Still, there is a good atmosphere and a bit of a buzz on a Saturday night.

For your notes: provinces such has Phetchabun, Bueng Kan or Loei up north have much more dramatic landscapes than the southern central ones. Ang Thong, Lopburi, Singburi, Chai Nat and Uthai Thani are fairly flat, albeit green at this time of year. ‘Know before you go’ as they say in search results and location-review summaries these days.

Another one to know is that if you are driving a new car with a red number plate, you are not allowed to drive at night (find hotels that serve food or have a restaurant next door), and you are obliged to fill in a special log book each day. This is a brown notebook as opposed to the standard car blue book, and you have to log your destination each day in case the police pull you over. This is done in pencil with a handy rubber to help over-write the previous day’s entry. What is the point? Absolutely no idea, but having a red number plate with ‘Bangkok’ on it is almost guaranteed to catch a provincial cop’s eye. A self-fulfilling traffic stop. Oh well. You get a proper white licence plate after about six weeks unless you order a particular lucky number, which takes longer. Highly sought after numbers can cost more than the actual car.

Road trips in Thailand can cover considerable distances, leading to many hours of driving, so they need to be plotted with regular breaks built-in. One way of doing that is to pull into a PTT petrol station which will have a Seven-11 and Amazon Café as standard, besides the local eateries. Amazon is good for coffee and a croissant mid-morning, although the Americano plus side-milk order delivers one of those sachets of powdered non-dairy-creamer, which gives you some measure of the place. One thing I did learn on this trip is that, ‘This coffee tastes like mud,’ has a Thai idiom which is roughly: ‘This coffee tastes like the water you wash your feet with’. Excellent. I’ll be honest though, I am no expert in mud flavours nor, thankfully, essences of feet washing water. I’m learning, though.

This trip lasting just a week, clocked up 910 kilometres door-to-door and took in over ten wats. Can you overdose on wats? It did seem like it was getting that way and eventually it did need to be an above average wat to make a persuasive case for a 50 km detour. Having said that, every province in Thailand has its share of interesting temples, whether historically or architecturally, so there will always be more to aim for.

The final thing to recount is that when you are in any ordination hall, standing in front of the Buddha statue, you are always amongst folks who are genuinely in awe as they whisper their prayers. There is no god or creator in Buddhism, so they aren’t worshipping a deity but rather, showing respect and gratitude for receiving the Buddha’s teachings. Whatever your own personal commitment to spiritual matters, this show of reverence is in itself quite life-affirming.