Right, now where were we...

G'day once again.


When last we wrote Debs and I were leaving Ayathaya having had a not so wonderful day... well we climbed aboard the train to find our seats were full with a mother and two children... I was all for turfing them out but Debs is a kinder more charitable soul than I (especially as it was a 4 hour journey...) luckily there was space in another carriage and we settled in for the trip.


We went to Phitsanulok which was a town within striking distance of Sukhothai which is a UNESCO world heritage site (like Stonehenge) and is a former capital of Thailand dating back to ages ago... (1257, I checked) the city is now in ruins but is in much better shape than Ayuthaya and is outside any urban centres so is a lot more peaceful. We hired bikes and cycled round most of the sight which contains 26 different buddist sites and temples including an amazing sitting buddha. Again the place was really pretty deserted, we saw about a half dozen other tourists and two of those had arrived on the bus with us. There are some photos of the temples below, it's hard to explain just how impressive the place is and I don't think it comes over in the photos but it was amazing to see the number and variety of beautiful buildings and structures that are now being properly restored and protected, at one point we assumed we were on a natural island, only to realise that we were surrounded on all sides by 4 huge man made moats.


The strange thing about Sukhothai was that so many of the buildings were in ruins, and as they came from a completely different culture we found it difficult to imagine what the original would have looked like, I would imagine a Thai person looking at a ruined castle or church in the UK would have a similar problem... I suppose we lacked the history to put flesh to the architectural bones... fortunaltely a solution to this problem was to be found in the next stop on our journey, another former capital of Thailand, Chiang Mai.



Chiang Mai has more temples than anywhere else in Thailand except Bangkok, it also has many temples from the same era as Sukhothai and so we were able to fill in the gaps and actually came to appreciate the sites we had seen earlier even more as we were able to see just how ornately temples from the same period were decorated and imagine just how magnificent the much larger ruined temples of Sukhothai must have been, it was great to see the connections between ancient and very modern Thailand.


Whilst in Chiang Mai we went on a one day trek out to an Elephant camp where we were able to play with elephants and go on a trek through the jungle on the back of one. Debs has her eye on bringing a baby elephant back as a pet, but having seen how much they eat I don't think even grandad Hendry's veggie patch could take the punishment... We bought a bunch of bananas to feed the elephants... and we first peeled them, until we were told that really wasn't neccesary... and then we continued to feed them one by one... we later saw them being fed whole bunches at a time... I have a feeling the poor elephant thought we were teasing it with our one banana at a time feeding strategy... frankly we were really doing it to get bang for our banana buck! We are on a backpackers budget!


OK, I've wittered on for ages already and there is still so much to tell you... hmmm we're in a whole different country now and have been for a week...


To sum up... whilst in Chiang Mai we had intended to leave after 3 or 4 days as our visa was almost up but we heard about a festival that was taking place in a few days and we decided to stay and check it out and maybe hire a moped to see some sights a bit further out... we ended up in the middle of a massive street party with everyone letting of fireworks, often inches away from our heads or feet and thousands of floating lanterns being released into the sky... We got stuck in and let of a few ourselves (having first checked that they were biodegradeable, our guilt about potential dead turtles would have been to high otherwise) and wandered through the night markets eating spring rolls, fresh corn on the cob and trying to wipe the grins from our sweet chilli encrusted faces. This came at the end of a day in which we had visited a Tiger sanctuary, some royal botanical gardens with orchids and lillies, booked our flight to Laos and just about pursuaded a scooter to struggle to the top of of a mountain to visit one of the most holy sites in Chiang Mai in time to watch the sun go down over the city before a slightly nervous descent in the dark dodging lightless bikes as the first lanterns were starting to rise over the city... it was good one.



Next stop Laos.