It was a struggle to get the school administration to give their blessing to any kind of weekend trip; my first thought was Khao Yai – Thailand's first national park with tons of waterfalls and readily available elephants, tigers, and bears, as well as white water rafting – but the director insisted that it was too dangerous during the wet season due to malarial mosquitoes; at first I thought this was just a ploy to trick me into teaching on Saturday, but I called up the park help desk and found out they did in fact have a decent swarm of the deadly bugs.
So I resolved to go to Sukothai – the great northern city of a previous era; the teachers first tried to have me make the 90-minute trip into Bangkok with the school driver, but I needed to get familiarized with the bus system, so I insisted on handling it myself.
I was supposed to grab a microbus that would zip along the expressway to the northern station in 45 minutes, but some no-good taxi drivers pointed me in the direction of the one of the many "straight-through-the-heart" buses and 3 hours later I was still sitting in traffic several miles from the station.
I decided to walk it and cut through the backpacker's district full of cheap hotels, pubs, and short-clad faraang (Thai for westerners). I did a double-take for the first few white people I passed – with their pasty skin, silly clothing, and confused expressions, they were truly a sight to behold. I bought some anti-malarial tablets from a local pharmacy for about a nickel a dose ($1/per in the states) – Thai drug stores are super-convenient as you can get any prescription drug without a prescription for a fraction of the price; unfortunately there's rarely a box or any instructions on use, but that's why we have Google.
There are bunches of trains and buses leaving for the northerly Chiang Mai route every evening; the buses usually tend to be more comfortable (with movies and frequent free meals), cheaper, and safer. I opted to take the train this time around – its big selling pointing is that it's considerably slower than a bus and so makes it possible to turn a 4-hour trip into a quasi-overnight one. I reached the train station with about half an hour til departure. At the ticket counter, I was informed that all seats were sold but I could buy a standing ticket for the same price ($3); apparently it was completely impossible to reach the bus station before the last one departed, so I had no choice but to become a 3rd class "standee."
When I boarded, I found a set of empty benches and sat down – a couple with a baby came along and looked as if they were about to claim their seats but then said something in Thai (probably to the effect of "Ewww, a backpacker – we better just stand") and I was left with my ample leg room. A little later an officer came through checking tickets and announced: "you have no seat number;" I put on my best bewildered look as if I too were trying to unravel the mystery of how I had come to be sitting down when my ticket specifically said I couldn't. He pulled me to another empty seat next to a hyperactive toddler that would likely never be claimed even if someone had a legitimate right to it.
The night was a painful one – I alternated positions between being folded over forward and slouching to such an extent that I could fit the Thai-sized backrests. I was nearly conscious when we rolled into Pritsanaluc at 4:30 the next morning. I took an exorbitantly priced ($1.25) bus to the ruins of the ancient empire of Sukothai.
The "old city" was jam-packed with old temples, palaces, and 13th century quickimarts. I cycled (50 cent daily bike rental) to a few dozen chedis with massive Buddha images and systems of moats and bridges. For random temples, the park had entry booths with steep admission prices for foreigners; the Thai rates were written in Thai numerals (an archaic style used exclusively for this purpose) and were about 75% off.
I spent the morning biking out into the country to check out the distant temples; for the most part, the temples had only a small sign post with no description of what awaited you if you hiked up what was often a long, steep trail; in at least one instance, I pedaled a few kilometers straight up a mountain only to discover there wasn't actually anything there. In the afternoon, I went to the museum, which offered a little insight into what all these random ruins were for, and more importantly, had air-conditioning. When I'd exhausted any desire to see any more crumbling wats and all energy in my legs, I took a bus back to the city of Phitsanuloc.
My guidebook (which is from 99 and attempts to cover everything in Asia in a few hundred pages) described this place as "vibrant" but failed to offer any points of interest beyond "flying vegetable restaurants" or any sort of directions to anywhere. So I randomly wandered around; as I was exploring the grounds of an impressive (modern) wat, a guy in an orange road randomly started talking to me. My first inclination (spawned from my wanderings in North Africa and various big cities) was to kick him in the shins and run away, but I've slowly come to realize that in Thailand, there's an odd tendency for the locals to just want to talk, without the usual implications of begging, drugs, or sex. He turned out to be a Buddhist monk who was studying English, and he was able to point me in the direction of the tourist office.
Thailand has an interesting approach to tourism offices as none of the staff actually speak anything but Thai; this strikes me as a remarkably ineffective solution for the case of the majority of tourists who are not in fact Thai. This one did have a map, however, so I was able to find my way around. I visited the singular point of interest – the flying vegetable cooks along the river; this apparently involved the waitstaff climbing onto a truck and having the cook fling stir-fried vegetables 10m through the air to a waiter standing on the shoulders of two other guys. I made the mistake of going a few hours before they started serving dinner; I ordered the cheapest thing on the menu (which was still twice as expensive as the standard carts) and waited anxiously for them to perform the trick. Though no one said it (in English), there was a mutual understanding of how silly it was to go through the whole spectacle just to serve collared greens to a lone backpacker; one waiter half-heartedly jumped on the truck and caught the flying clump – I wasn't quite driven to spontaneous applause, but it was probably one of the better airborne vegetables I've tried and quite possibly worth the 75 cents - even without the pyramid.
There wasn't too much of interest in the rest of the city – a public park along the river was filled with runners, ping pongers, and badmintonists, as well as a massive, high-spirited, public Tae Bo session. I went to a Catholic school for their nightly Mass – the students all showed up in matching pajamas, so for once I didn't feel underdressed.
I took the 10 o'clock train to Ayuthaya; I had had such a good time on the first train ride that I once again signed up for a 3rd class seat and managed a good 15 minutes of sleep before my train pulled into the next great empire of Thailand at a quarter til 4. Unlike Sukothai, Ayuthaya has a modern city growing out of the ruins and covers a massive area (the brochures claim it was once bigger than London). Thousands of stray dogs roam the streets here and in the early morning hours, before people showed up to keep them inline, they decided my path; the dogs here are somewhat reminiscent of a zombie horror film – they lie on roads, sidewalks, and railroad tracks looking for all the world like they've been hit by a car, but the instant you come near, they spring into action, snarling and chasing anything within an arbitrary territory which changes by the minute; the best part – over 7% of Thai dogs are rabid.
With a 75 cent/day bike, I made for the country roads north of town – the tourist map I had was a bad photocopy and I mistook rivers for roads and got pretty effectively lost, but I did manage to find some sort of elephant coliseum where riders no-doubt once jousted on top their big-eared steeds. I asked a few people for directions but they pointed me down roads that ran straight to the middle of nowhere and it was a long while before I got back to civilization. Back at the island, I climbed the Golden Mountain, visited the grand palace, and a hundred more wats. Huge tourist-oriented markets surrounded the main attractions and all the silly farang rode elephants through the streets. The main industry of this town seems to be the production and sale of fairy-floss; every road was lined with shops and carts hawking this sugary string – in one spot, a line ran around the block for what could only have been the best cotton candy in the world, given that there were a hundred more shops selling the exact same thing at the exact same price with no line.
After 2 days of riding, my skin had turned a bright red and I was desperately seeking sunblock, but it was nowhere to be found; in the end I resorted to putting on my winter jacket – and in 40-degree heat I got some pretty weird looks. When I was well south of the island, I attempted to ask the residents how to get across the river. They seemed quite unwilling to admit the existence of a ferry across and insisted that I go 10km around by road to get there I needed to go; from the bits of Thai I understood, I gathered that one group knew where there was a ferry nearby that could get me across for a nickel but they didn't think I would understand if they attempted to explain how to get there. So I grabbed a local taxi-truck (rather tricky with a bike) and got dropped in the center of town. I stopped by a public park and attempted to chain my bike to a tree but a guy came along and demanded 10 baht; I went down the street and tried again with similar results; apparently there was a large festival in this park and there was a fee for parking bicycles – this was just about the silliest thing I'd ever heard so I waited til the guys weren't looking and tied up to a tree – chances are they wouldn't bother to impound it, and since I had left no deposit or ID with the rental place, I really didn't care if they did.
After dropping my bike off, I grabbed a bus back to Bangkok; when I reached Mo Chit bus station, utter chaos ensued. I was sure that there were at least two buses leaving from here and going directly to my town but no one seemed particularly knowledgeable about them; the motorcycle taxi drivers told me that they were in fact across town and I could pay a few hundred bath for a ride there, the police pointed me to a bus terminal a kilometer away, the ticket counters there all routed me in a circular path to the various floors of the terminal, and the information desk insisted that all buses had stopped and I would have to get a hotel for the night. With the last hours of the evening fading away, I made a mad dash from the station – dodging hordes of taxi and dtuk-dtuk drivers. I jumped on a random bus and met some random people who were more knowledgeable than the entire staff of Mo Chit put together and got me on a bus home within 5 minutes.
Woah, there's actual geography in this part of the country!
I can't even begin to guess.
Typical diseased pigeon
One guy pedals the bike in dress shirt and pants while someone else sits on the back with the umbrella - only the Japanese could come up with something this silly
The world famous flying vegetables
Elephant fighting ground
This guy was pretty darn cocky
There were also depictions of him wrestling a shark and eating a live cobra
Silly white people and their elephants
This is why we have traffic problems
They've got dried fruits I didn't even know existed
River train
