The Litthai Guest House at Phitsanulok is a damn good deal. For about $12 a night, we got a big bed in a nice, clean room with a private bathroom and cold air conditioning. The package comes with free breakfast, which was nothing to write home about - but still a nice perk. The guest house is really more of a hotel (there's 60 rooms), and it's located in the middle of downtown Philok within stumbling distance of the night market.

After breakfast, we caught a tuk-tuk to the government bus station. We caught a cheap bus from Philok to the Sukhothai bus terminal. The ride was bumpy, dusty and hot, but we were treated to some killer scenery of rice fields, distant mountains, and countless little villages. Once in the "new city" of Sukhothai, we paid 10 baht (about 25 cents US) for a small bus to the "old city".

At one time in Thai history, Sukhothai was the capital. People refer to this point in history with a huge sense of pride. Thailand was a major country in Asia with a powerful king and a huge conquest. During this period, the kings built majestic temples dedicated to Buddha. This area (now called the "old city") is barricaded with dirt walls and a winding maze of ponds and moats.

Once we arrived at the gates, we walked around the corner, ate lunch, had a beer, and rented bikes to ride around the temple district. We paid our entrance fee - a lofty 120 baht for foriegners (about $3 US) - and rode around for four hours taking pictures and staring in awe at the temple ruins.

I'll make this entry short and let the pictures do the talking for me. Here is a small sampling of what we saw:

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There are tons of pictures in this collection, but I don't want to crash the Bootsnall server. The entire area took four hours to ride around. By the time we finished, we were sun-stroked and hungry.

We caught a bus back to Philok and headed straight to the river for dinner. Phitsanulok is one of the only places in Thailand where house boats are still legal inside the city limits. There are also a variety of cool floating restaurants that serve terrific seafood. The area around the river reminded us of Town Lake in Austin and the Hike & Bike Trail. We found a clean restaurant with some friendly staff, so we stopped for dinner.

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After dinner, we walked back through town towards the night market.

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Phitsanulok is a cool little college town with a particularly high concentration of young people. The night market definitely caters to this crowd, and there were a ton of vendors selling the latest trendy fashions... all of which reminded us of the punk/grunge clothes that were popular in the US back in the late 70s and mid-90s. Everywhere you look there were t-shirts of punk bands that I used to peep back in my high-school days... The Exploited, The Clash, The Dead Kennedys... and a few off beat designs that were very 80s.... the color palate included a ton of pinks, light blues, silvers and (of course) black... it was pretty funny.

We had a terrific time walking around digging through clothes and checking out the people. There aren't too many Westerners that make it to Phitsanulok, so we definitely stood out in the crowd. I found some killer t-shirts that I wanted to buy as gifts and for myself - but no one carried XL... and there were only a few larges to be found. All of the good stuff was Medium and Small. Such is my luck.

After a few hours of stumbling around, we headed back to the hotel, packed and prepared for our 9am train ride the next morning.