The Long Way to Ayutthaya

A Four-Day Voyage Aboard a Teak Barge of Anantara Hotels From Bangkok to Ayutthaya

A private voyage aboard Loy Dream, Loy Pela Voyages’ restored century-old Thai rice barge, travels from Bangkok down the Chao Phraya River towards the Gulf of Thailand before turning north for Bang Pa-In Palace and the ancient capital of Ayutthaya.

Taking the red-eye from Tokyo to Bangkok has at least one advantage: you arrive early enough to beat the traffic. We drove directly from the airport to Anantara Riverside Bangkok Resort, where Loy Dream, the two-stateroom restored rice barge operated by Loy Pela Voyages, was waiting to take us on a four-day private journey along the Chao Phraya River to Ayutthaya.

We were early for our 8 a.m. departure, so tropical fruit and fresh coconut juice appeared while we waited. Before long, two smartly dressed stewards approached us.

“Welcome to Bangkok,” one of them said. “We will be taking care of you for your cruise.”

They led us down to the river, where we saw Loy Dream for the first time.

Meet the Loy Dream, a Century-Old Thai Rice Barge

I had wanted to charter a boat this summer, but I had been quite specific about what I did not want. Modern yachts, however luxurious, were out. There are plenty of them in Asia and the Mediterranean, and I wanted something that belonged specifically to Thailand.

The Loy Dream was exactly what I had hoped for. At 18 metres, she was long and low on the water, with the broad wooden hull of the rice barge she once was and a covered upper deck that looked almost as though a small Thai house had been placed on top. Round portholes punctuated the hull; dark timber, carved panels and ornate railings replaced the chrome and glass of a modern yacht.

Approximately a century old and restored for private cruising, Loy Dream has just two staterooms and accommodates a maximum of four passengers. Against the high-rises of Bangkok, she looked wonderfully out of place. For the next four days, the entire boat belonged to us.

Within minutes of boarding, in my mind at least, Bangkok had become Siam.

Inside Loy Dream

Within minutes of going onboard, I was already taking photos of everything. The main deck, with its traditional Thai accents, was so picturesque.

“Perhaps you would like to see your stateroom first and prepare for the voyage?” our steward suggested. It was true. I was still wearing my sleeping travel wear from Tokyo, which was not quite vacation mode.

I followed him down a staircase and through a narrow hallway to a room at the end. This was to be my room, and I immediately liked it.

It was the first reminder that this had once been a working boat rather than a floating hotel. It was deep rather than conventionally wide and arranged over several levels to fit the proportions of the original barge.

The walls were washed in pale celadon green, with polished timber underfoot, carved Thai screens and a round porthole looking directly onto the river. Several steps above the entrance, the bed occupied its own raised wooden platform, almost like a room within the room, dressed in white linen and Thai textiles.

Down a few steps was a dressing area with an elaborate mirror. Beyond it came the surprise: a generously sized bathroom with a proper glass-enclosed shower and plenty of room to move around.

Loy Dream may have begun life carrying rice, but nobody was asking us to live like cargo.

I had imagined spending hours on the raised bed with a book, watching the river through the porthole. In fact, I think I sat there exactly once.

Almost all our waking hours were spent upstairs.

Life Aboard Loy Dream

The covered upper deck ran almost the length of the boat, with polished floorboards, black woven chairs, Thai furniture, flowers, a dining table and broad openings on either side. At the bow, ornate railings framed the river ahead.

My place was a green daybed piled with Thai silk cushions. From there, I could put my feet up and watch Bangkok pass.

We had barely unpacked when the first activities began. My daughter had a yoga session, while a practitioner from Anantara’s spa turned part of the upper deck into a treatment room for my gua sha facial, using a jade scraper and roller. My husband had a traditional Thai massage nearby.

Bangkok continued past outside.

It was an unusually pleasant way to recover from an overnight flight.

Lunch on the Chao Phraya

By noon, our private chef had begun establishing another pattern. Meals aboard were generally served as multi-course menus rather than family-style spreads, and the table was set with Benjarong tableware.

Our first lunch began with a composed salad, followed by prawns and crisp pastry, and finished with ripe mango, purple sticky rice and coconut cream.

I had assumed that food would be one of the compromises of spending four days on an 18-metre boat. However, our chef repeatedly proved otherwise.

The best part of the dining room, however, was what lay beyond the table. Through the open sides of the upper deck, the scenery continually changed. We ate mango and sticky rice from Benjarong plates while Bangkok went past.

From the River to Muay Thai

The voyage was to be four days of learning about the traditions and culture of Thailand in a most personal way. That afternoon we began our discovery with a destination hardly on the bucket list of most travelers to Bangkok: the great green expanse contained within a bend of the Chao Phraya and commonly known as Bangkok’s “green lung.”

Our guide was waiting with bicycles and tricycles. Our first stop was a Muay Thai school set among greenery and ponds, run by a former boxing champion who had retired from competition and was now teaching local children.

“Muay Thai is tough on the body,” he told us. “I spent my life hitting my body intentionally to make it tougher in every way. Even my bones are larger due to trauma.”

Today he passes on his same winning technique to school children who come to practice after school.

Only a few hours earlier, I had been lying on the upper deck having my face worked over with a gua sha stone. Now I was standing beside a rice field watching children learn how to box.

We ended the excursion at a Hindu temple, where there were few foreign visitors and plenty of local worshippers going about their devotions. These were relatively simple stops, but that was part of their appeal. They offered glimpses of life beyond the Bangkok most visitors encounter.

Then we returned to Loy Dream and continued south.

Cocktails on the Gulf of Siam

By early evening, cocktails appeared on the bow.

Flowers had been tied to Loy Dream’s ornate railings, and drinks, wine and small appetisers were set out as the light began to fade. Beyond our glasses were freighters, working ships and the lights of the industrial waterfront.

It was an unusual setting for welcome cocktails on a luxury cruise, and far more interesting than the conventional sunset panorama I had expected.

“Would you like another drink?” our steward asked.

There seemed no compelling reason to say no.

Dinner for Three

Dinner was served beneath the curved wooden roof of the upper deck, where the table had been laid with flowers, wine glasses and Benjarong tableware. The intricately patterned, multicoloured porcelain looked particularly striking against the dark wood of the boat.

Our chef had planned the welcome dinner as a Thai interpretation of surf and turf. A procession of small appetisers was followed by an impressive lobster course, then meat and dessert, each individually plated.

There were three of us aboard, but the chef was cooking as though there were considerably more people to impress.

We ended our first day with drinks on deck overlooking the ships, docks and factories of the Gulf. It had been a remarkably full day—yoga, spa treatments, lunch, cycling, Muay Thai, a temple visit, cocktails and dinner—but it had never felt as though we were being marched through a programme.

From Bangkok to Ayutthaya by River

The following morning, Loy Dream turned around and began travelling north.

We passed through Bangkok again, watching the city assemble itself from the river: luxury hotels and residential towers, old palaces, Buddhist temples, working piers and riverside houses, with boats continually cutting between them.

Then Bangkok began to fall away.

The buildings became fewer and lower. The factories disappeared. Concrete gave way to vegetation, and traditional Thai river houses began appearing along the banks. Some were modest; others were substantial wooden homes that made us wonder who had once lived there—perhaps an aristocratic family or a prosperous merchant.

Eventually even the houses became scarce.

Into the Greenery of the Chao Phraya

There were stretches of river where almost nothing appeared to be happening at all. Ahead was broad water; along the banks were dense vegetation and great patches of aquatic plants. Occasionally another boat appeared, or a temple, or a wooden house. Then there would be nothing again for quite a while.

This was where the bow came into its own. Two woven chairs faced forward on the polished wooden deck, with nothing between us and the view except Loy Dream’s ornate railing.

This part of the voyage was particularly enjoyable because there was nothing specific we were supposed to be looking at. We could read, listen to music, have a massage or simply sit at the bow and see what appeared around the next bend.

Sometimes nothing did, and that was perfectly fine.

On a conventional trip, one tends to move from attraction to attraction: hotel, car, temple, palace, restaurant, car, hotel. The spaces in between barely register.

From Loy Dream, those spaces became an important part of the trip.

Arriving in Ayutthaya by River

Founded in 1350, Ayutthaya served as the capital of Siam for more than four centuries, until its destruction by a Burmese army in 1767. At its height it was one of Asia’s great centres of commerce and diplomacy, with connections extending to China, Japan, India, Persia and Europe.

Its geography explains much of its success. Ayutthaya developed on an island surrounded by three rivers connected to the sea. Foreign merchants established communities there, while the Siamese court conducted diplomacy with governments thousands of miles away.

Arriving by river put that history into context. Instead of appearing as an isolated collection of ruins reached after a drive from Bangkok, Ayutthaya became the destination of the waterways that had helped create its wealth and importance.

We spent several hours exploring Ayutthaya Historical Park and other temples, walking among red-brick monasteries, weathered prangs, large Buddha images and enormous old trees that had grown around the remains.

It was hot, and after several days of watching Thailand from the water, it felt slightly strange to be walking around it again.

After several hours among temples and bricks, I was very happy to see Loy Dream.

At Your Service

The rest of our days followed a similar pattern, expertly arranged by Loy Pela and Anantara but with enough flexibility to ensure that the itinerary never became an obligation.

We learnt to make traditional Thai sweets from mung beans, painstakingly shaped and decorated to resemble miniature fruits. There were temples and historical sites, but also long periods for reading, listening to music or doing very little on deck.

At one point in Ayutthaya, after walking around in the heat, we decided we wanted another Thai massage.

“Can we have one?”

A few telephone calls later, it was arranged.

That flexibility was one of the advantages of chartering the entire boat. There was an itinerary, certainly, but we weren’t required to become its employees.

By then, returning to Loy Dream after an excursion had become part of the pleasure. Everyone had established a favourite place to sit, and mine was the green daybed upstairs. Drinks appeared when we wanted them, and meals continued to be far more elaborate than I had expected from such a compact galley.

The Famous River Prawns of Ayutthaya

The culinary highlight was the Ayutthaya river prawn.

These enormous freshwater prawns are one of the foods for which the area is famous, and when ours arrived, I understood why. We were fortunate enough to have them twice.

Our chef grilled them simply, leaving the flesh firm without becoming tough and allowing their natural sweetness to come through.

Of all the elaborate dishes prepared during the voyage, these were what I most wanted to eat again.

One Last Temple

Before our first meal on our last day, we went ashore to a local temple to give thanks for our safe and happy journey. The crew had purchased baskets of food for each of us in advance to present as offerings.

We joined local worshippers, conspicuous as the foreigners in the group, presented our baskets and received a blessing from a monk, accompanied by a sprinkling of holy water from a ceremonial brush.

Then we returned to the boat for the chef’s version of a farewell brunch.

Caviar on a Century-Old Rice Barge

Calling it brunch hardly did it justice.

A large seafood platter occupied the centre of the table, piled with crab legs, prawns and mussels. Beside it sat a large tin of caviar with blinis and the usual accompaniments, along with salads and several other dishes that might reasonably have constituted lunch on their own.

Caviar had not been on my list of things I expected to eat aboard a converted Thai rice barge.

Halfway through the meal, our steward approached.

“Are you still hungry?”

“Not really,” I said.

“Our chef would be delighted to prepare his specialties for you.”

Since this was our final meal aboard, refusing seemed unnecessarily sensible.

There were eggs Benedict and other Western breakfast dishes. I asked for Thai noodle soup and pad Thai.

Naturally, we ordered them.

Back to Bangkok

And so our final approach to Bangkok was made over an increasingly improbable brunch of seafood, caviar and blinis, followed by eggs Benedict, noodle soup and pad Thai.

It was far too much.

We ate it anyway.

Outside, Bangkok gradually returned. The banks became more densely built, and houses were followed by temples, hotels and high-rises.

Four days earlier, we had left the same city aboard an old wooden rice barge, travelling south through factories and freighters towards the Gulf of Siam. Then we had made a U-turn and travelled north through a completely different landscape of traditional river houses, vegetation, temples, royal palaces and the ruins of Ayutthaya.

That, ultimately, was what made the voyage interesting. We had seen the Chao Phraya not simply as a backdrop to Bangkok but as a working river, a transportation route, a link to Thailand’s history and, for four days, the view from our own front deck.

Driving from Bangkok to Ayutthaya would have been considerably faster.

That was precisely the point.

I left Loy Dream with one very specific problem: I had developed a taste for Ayutthaya river prawns, and I was going home to Tokyo.

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FACTS ABOUT VOYAGES WITH LOY PELA / ANANTARA

What is Loy Dream?
Loy Dream is an 18-metre restored Thai rice barge operated by Loy Pela Voyages by Anantara. The private vessel has two air-conditioned ensuite staterooms and accommodates up to four guests.

What is the itinerary?
Our four-day, three-night private voyage departed from Anantara Riverside Bangkok Resort and travelled south along the Chao Phraya towards the Gulf of Thailand, historically known as the Gulf of Siam. Loy Dream then turned north, travelling through Bangkok towards Bang Pa-In Palace and Ayutthaya before returning to the city.

What is life aboard like?
Most of the day is spent on the large covered upper deck, which contains the dining area, seating and daybeds, with open views of the river. The two split-level staterooms below have air-conditioning and ensuite bathrooms.

What about food?
A private chef prepares meals aboard. Our menus included multi-course Thai lunches and dinners, lobster, Ayutthaya river prawns and a final seafood-and-caviar brunch. Meals were served on Benjarong tableware.

What can you do along the way?
Excursions vary with the itinerary and can include temples, Bang Pa-In Palace, Ayutthaya Historical Park and local experiences. Our voyage also included yoga, spa treatments, Muay Thai, a Thai dessert-making lesson and additional massages arranged along the way.

How flexible is it?
Because Loy Dream is privately chartered, there is considerably more flexibility than on a conventional cruise. Activities can be adjusted and additional experiences arranged where possible.

Who is it best for?
Couples, families or two couples looking for a private alternative to a conventional river cruise or modern yacht charter, particularly travellers interested in Thai history, food and life along the Chao Phraya.

Information and reservations:
Loy Pela Voyages by Anantara. Current itineraries, prices, inclusions and availability should be confirmed directly at the time of booking.

READ MORE ABOUT THE BEST CRUISES IN THE WORLD IN TRAVELIFE MAGAZINE

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served on Benjarong tableware aboard Loy Dream”, “caption”: “A Thai-style lobster course served aboard Loy Dream.”, “description”: “A Thai-style lobster course presented on ornate Benjarong tableware during dinner aboard Loy Dream.”, “category”: [“Loy Dream”, “dining”, “Thai cuisine”, “lobster”, “Benjarong tableware”], “file_url”: “https://www.travelifemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Master-Photography-Standard-20.jpg” }, { “image_number”: 20, “filename”: “chao-praya-bangkok-river-cruise-loy-dream-5.jpg”, “title”: “Caviar Brunch Aboard Loy Dream”, “alt_text”: “Caviar brunch with accompaniments served aboard Loy Dream on the Chao Phraya River”, “caption”: “Caviar and accompaniments served as part of brunch aboard Loy Dream.”, “description”: “Brunch aboard Loy Dream featuring caviar with traditional accompaniments alongside salads, cheeses and other dishes.”, “category”: [“Loy Dream”, “dining”, “brunch”, “caviar”], “file_url”: “https://www.travelifemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/chao-praya-bangkok-river-cruise-loy-dream-5.jpg” }, { “image_number”: 21, “filename”: “chao-praya-bangkok-river-cruise-loy-dream-7.jpg”, “title”: “Seafood Brunch Aboard Loy Dream”, “alt_text”: “Seafood brunch with crab, prawns and caviar aboard Loy Dream on the Chao Phraya River”, “caption”: “A seafood brunch served aboard Loy Dream.”, “description”: “An elaborate brunch aboard Loy Dream featuring seafood, caviar and a selection of accompanying dishes during the private river voyage.”, “category”: [“Loy Dream”, “dining”, “brunch”, “seafood”, “caviar”], “file_url”: “https://www.travelifemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/chao-praya-bangkok-river-cruise-loy-dream-7.jpg” }, { “image_number”: 22, “filename”: “chao-praya-bangkok-river-cruise-loy-dream-19.jpg”, “title”: “Loy Dream Upper Deck at Night”, “alt_text”: “Illuminated upper deck of Loy Dream at night during a private Chao Phraya River cruise”, “caption”: “The illuminated upper deck of Loy Dream at night.”, “description”: “The open upper deck of Loy Dream illuminated at night, with polished teak flooring and lounge seating during the private Chao Phraya River voyage.”, “category”: [“Loy Dream”, “upper deck”, “night”, “Chao Phraya River”], “file_url”: “https://www.travelifemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/chao-praya-bangkok-river-cruise-loy-dream-19.jpg” } ]