Sukhothai

We had a great time during our short trip to Sukhothai. If we had a car it would have taken around an hour to drive to it from Uttaradit but we took the bus which took two hours since it made so many stops. Unfortunately, most road signs do not have any English so we weren't able to keep track of what towns we were going through. Sometimes it was hard to figure out if the spots people were standing in at the side of the road were actual bus stops or if people could just flag down the bus anywhere.

We paid 120 baht (about $3.50) to get there on an aircon bus and half that to get back on a fan bus.

We came into New Sukhothai around dinner time and enjoyed some delicious sausage sandwiches at our guesthouse, J and J guesthouse before going exploring. Regular rooms were booked so we splurged on a bungalow for 900 baht with aircon. J and J had mixed reviews on the web so I wasn't expecting much but it was really quite nice. Staff spoke English and were friendly, the restaurant had extensive Thai and Western options and opened at 7 am, and our room was great. There was a pool as well but it rained the rest of that day.

Bungalows at J and J Guesthouse, Sukhothai.

We wandered around town a bit but there wasn't much to see. Since Sukhothai is so much bigger than Uttaradit I expected there to be a lot of bars and things to do but that was not the case at all-- in fact, the whole town seemed rather rundown. We woke up early the next morning to see the star attraction-- Old Sukhothai.

I won't rehash the whole history, if you're interested-- google it yourself! (Although, all the websites I found were pretty disappointing) I had done a fair amount of reading on the site when I took a course on Urban Archaeology in school so it was cool to finally visit it for real.

We hired a tuk-tuk driver to take us to the park and drive us around for the day. I'm glad we opted to hire a driver rather than rent bikes as the site was 12 kilometers away and then really spread out-- it is the ruins of a whole city after all! It was also extremely hot that day-- so the ride was nice. After more than three hours of sightseeing we were pretty worn out and finally headed back-- nice little trip! This is one of the reasons why we moved here-- now we get to see these sights at a leisurely pace, a little at a time, and really get to know this country. We're looking forward to more of these little adventures.

All of my pictures are on my Flickr page as usual but above are my favorites.