Ayutthaya

And now for something completely different. Last Friday Nongnut's brother Amnart, a Bangkok traffic policeman, kindly drove us out to Ayyutthaya/Ayudhya: Thailand's answer to Angkor Wat: a ruined city about 80 km from the city. 

Amnart was a short, hearty, muscular man with a grey burr cut, and reminded us a little of Uncle Marion.  Apparently his sister sends a lot of her colleagues and visiting westerners to him to escort them to Ayutthaya, which he apparently regards as a kind of good deed he does on behalf of Nongnut, in whose accomplishments he takes enormous pride. Their father was a policeman in Trang in southern Thailand. Amnart's English was rusty, but he described his father as a kind of Godfather figure who ruled his district armed to the teeth. Amnart, unlike his sister, was no scholar, and joined his father in the constabulary, in which he was engaged in hand-to-hand combat with Moslem separatists. In his last engagement, he was hit with a ricochet from a dum-dum bullet and lay in a coma for seven days and given up for dead. He finally awoke to find one of the princesses at his bedside, thanking him on behalf of Thailand. But he had enough of combat and moved to Bangkok to direct traffic.