Sukhothai "Rising Happiness"

Pedro 7 Hours into Our Train Ride North
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We arrived in Bangkok late and hopped on a train the next morning. We were heading North from Bangkok to Phitsanulok (the larger city an hour outside of Sukhothai, better accommodation). It was an eight hour train ride from Bangkok with hard wooden seats and open windows (no a/c, needless to say we were sweating). It really was not that bad, the only problem was that our bums hurt so horribly by the end of the trip I had to keep standing up. To tell you the truth my bum still hurt a bit and we where taking a five our bus ride the next day, oh the joys of travel. Thailand is an extremely beautiful lush country and the train is a wonderful way to see the countryside.

View from the Train
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The train dropped us off right in the middle of a busy food market in the center of Phitanulok. Which was great because we were starving! We roamed the market looking for any recognizable looking food that we had commonly enjoyed at our local Thai restaurants (in Seattle).

"We will keep the unknown for another day, we just need food for now".

To our demise we could only recognize some basic things, "well that looks like barbecued chicken, lets get a few of those and that looks like noodles and curry maybe that would be good". We choose to bypass the fish heads, the funny looking fried meat balls, and anything else that we could not decipher the basic ingredient. "We will keep the unknown for another day, we just need food for now". When we had picked our dishes they spooned the curry or sate or stirfry into little plastic bags. As we stood there with our bags full of food, looking into them as though looking at our new gold fish swimming around, we wondered how we were going to eat all this beautiful food. The chicken on a stick was simple but the curry, rice and stirfry...well not something I was ready to eat with my hands out of plastic bags. Off to the hostel we go in search of cutlery.

Budda Statue
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The next day we headed off to Sukhothai which is an hour away and is the most well kept temple ruin in Thailand. Sukothai Historical Park was the original capital of the first Thai kingdom. There remains 21 historical sites of old temples and religious sanctuaries. The remains are amazing! Extremely expansive, you could only imagine what it looked like in its' hay day. Unfortunately we had very little detailed information on the sites themselves so we found ourselves taking funny photos and just enjoying our bikes that we rented for the day. While the sites were amazing the park its self was out of this world! There were beautiful landscaped forests and beautiful water byways. The park was vast and we biked through the shady trees and enjoyed the breeze (it is always around 85 degrees plus high humidity).

Budda Statue
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It was a beautiful day. Next stop the cultural rich city of Chang Mai.