Southeast Asia

Since my 250B a night did not buy hot water I had a very quick shower this morning. Breakfast at the guesthouse was wonderful I had a pancake about an inch thick with ‘honey flavoured syrup’. Got an email from Dee, who’s in Pai and she said its gorgeous, so I’m going to move onto Chaing Mai tonight and Pai the following day. Ill do it in 2 section so that I can break up the 11 hour bus ride.

Went out at 9:00 to the Sukhothai historical park. The first place I stopped was the museum which was great for the first 3 minutes until I realized it was school excursion day and there were about 200 school kids from about 4 or 5 different schools all with their little excursion day booklets to fill in before school the next day. Unfortunately for me on the back of the booklet was a ‘talk to a foreigner’ section where they had to attain information such as name, country, occupation, favourite place in Thailand and a signature. Of course the first I knew about it was when I got corner by a swarm of 10 12 year old school children all holding out the booklets and pens for me to complete the information. The biggest mistake of all was filling in the first one, because then word spread that there was a girl in the museum in a pink top who’ll fill in that section for you and the swarm of kids got bigger and bigger. It took 30 minutes before I could move from the spot. After that, some of them had obviously gone back and told their friends and smaller groups came searching for me to have their booklets completed. They were all very gorgeous children though and very polite.

What is unbelievable here is how every second person tells you ‘you are beautiful’ and then they either start talking about my eyes or pointing or want to touch my hair?! I’ve had the same thing from a very random mix of people. Bought my first souvenir at the museum, a little wooden bookmark with an elephant on it for 25B.

After the museum I rented a bike from one of the 20 bike rental shops along the road. The park where the ruins are is beautiful and I had such a nice time riding around all the gardens and to the different ruins.

Ran into more school kids and filled out more forms, they also wanted to take photos with me for some reason so now there are a lot of photos of me and various school children floating all around Sukhothai. Despite the beauty of the ruins I found them all very similar and only saw 5 out of the 20 or so old temples in the park, some were very impressive with large moats and grand symmetrical buildings.

At 1:00 I returned my bike and caught the Sawngthaew (small pick up with a row of benches down either side in the back) back to the city so that I could get the 1:40 bus to Chaing Mai. However, my driver also worked a double life as a silk trader and we took numerous back streets delivering rolls of Thai silk to 7 houses. At 1:40 I was still on the same little truck even though the ride should have taken 10 minutes.

Finally made the bus station at 2:00 and bought a ticket for the 2:00 bus. Met a German girl called Sandra who had also missed the 1:40 bus. Found out Sandra is studying Business Admin, its nice to meet someone else doing business, many of the backpackers look at me as though I’m diseased when I tell them I study marketing and finance; they all take cultural studies or arts, majoring in language.

I had read that the bus trip takes about 6 hours. Obviously my bus driver had decided he didn’t need that long and was aiming for a record because we were traveling at a decent speed for most of the way and I was glad the road was flat and straight. Its not very often that your on the bus and yet overtaking every other vehicle on the road, and yet that is what we did. Made it to Chaing Mai in just over 5 hours, I think in Aus it would have been a 7 hour ride. This was the first time I’ve seen a lot of wide open spaces and green fields, also saw the first mountains I’ve seen here. It sounds weird but even with all the bus travel I’ve done I don’t think I’ve actually been up a half decent hill here, it’s just so flat.

Sandra and I shared a tuk tuk into the city but we had decided on different guesthouses and so we went out separate ways. I stayed at ‘your guesthouse’ and managed to grab their last bed which was a huge double bed in a private room with its own bathroom and hot water for 200B. it didn’t have a lot of charm, in fact on a charm scale of 1-10 I’d give it negative 2, and I don’t think the bathroom had been cleaned this decade, but it was great value.

At 8 I wasn’t particularly tired and all I’d eaten since breakfast was a bag of biscuits so I went in search of dinner. About 20m down the road was a restaurant with live music and an all you can eat BBQ for 115B (less than $4). You choose your meat and cook it yourself on the Barbie, and there were salads galore. It was so good to have real meat, I ate 3 pieces of steak (its ok mum, they were small). There were also veggies like broccoli, carrots and potatoes which I haven’t seen since I left home. I ate so much food.

Where there is steak, there are Aussies and I met a guy from Brisbane who had just come from China and a Spanish (Eva) girl who had spent the last 6 months in Aus. I had a great night, Eva is going to come to Pai with me tomorrow.

Tags: Thailand

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 17th, 2005 at 2:00 am and is filed under Thailand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.