Historic Towns near Bangkok
A visual guide from the Bangkok travel guide — see all posters in Visual Guides.
An hour north of Bangkok the ground opens into rice flats and the brick cores of a ruined capital rise out of them. Ayutthaya was one of the largest cities on earth in the seventeenth century, and its footprint is still legible from a bicycle saddle on a flat afternoon. Central Thailand is dense with towns that predate the capital or grew alongside it: river ports, railway towns, teak shophouse streets built on rice and timber money. Most work as a day trip, and trains for the northern and southern routes now leave from Krung Thep Aphiwat rather than Hua Lamphong.
Within a day
Ayutthaya, about eighty kilometres north, is the headline: brick prang, the root-wrapped Buddha head at Wat Mahathat, and a compact island centre best covered by hired bicycle. Trains run from Krung Thep Aphiwat Central Terminal in roughly an hour and a half. Nonthaburi's old riverfront sits at the northern end of the Chao Phraya express boat route, with Ko Kret a short hop further upstream at Pak Kret — together a slower, greener half day. Samut Songkhram, ninety minutes southwest, has the Mae Klong railway market where awnings fold back as the train edges through.
Further out
Kanchanaburi, roughly two and a half hours west, pairs the wartime railway and its cemeteries with limestone hills and the Erawan waterfalls; the two halves make a much better overnight than a rushed day trip. Lopburi, about two hours north by train, has Khmer-era laterite towers, a seventeenth-century palace complex and a large, confident macaque population that treats the old town as its own. Phetchaburi, south towards the coast, keeps a hilltop palace and rows of painted shophouses and sees a fraction of the visitor traffic.