The plan for this day was to check out the Sukhothai Historical Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Breakfast didn’t work out with our hotel, so we found a better option at a shop somewhere else. (My favourite part about the hotel was the pond with a large school of curious koi. I could have hung out with them all day, but we had things to see!) With coffee and breakfast out of the way, we made our way to the Historical Park.
The park is huge, and we ended up driving through, to a location south of it, where we discovered Wat Chetuphon, a deserted ruin with two large headless (and handless) Buddha statues. The ponds in front of the wat were full of colourful water lilies. It was a very quiet location, with only us, and a few Thai people nearby, harvesting fruit from the nearby trees. Crystal talked to one of them, and although she couldn’t confirm what the fruit was that they were harvesting, it was established that it was very bitter. They seemed like ornamental crabapples, some were green, and some were red.
I like finding the places where people are not. There are good reasons tourists go to the popular places they do but too many people ruin the photo. Well, any people ruin the photo, unless I know them, or I include them, just for scale. I know, most people want to see pictures of other people. Some people may even want to see me in pictures, but I generally don’t want to be in them. In any case, some of the most interesting things I have found are the things most people aren’t looking at.
From the abandoned wat we went back to the historical park. It wasn’t too busy. We paid the reasonable 100 Baht per person entry fee. In hindsight, we should have considered renting bicycles (20 Baht each), getting a ticket for the tourist tram (60 Baht each), or even one of the little cars they have.
The park was huge, and the day was beginning to warm up. The sun was blazing down out of the clear blue sky, and it began to sap our energy. We decided on the main features of the park we wanted to see this day, and we would come again later to see more of it.
I was shooting photos on my Panasonic G9, on my iPhone, as well as getting some iPhone video clips. At the same time I also was shooting photos on my very compact Panasonic GM1 with an odd Panasonic 15 mm f/8 lens I’d picked up recently. We ended up sticking around the ruins for about three hours, and I was busy the whole time, switching between devices. Sounds like work, but I like it, and I couldn’t wait to see the results.
We had considered sticking around Sukhothai for another night, but decided we could make it to Chiang Mai by supper time. So, off we went, enjoying the capable air conditioning system in our car. We could have made our lives much easier by renting bikes or something, but we also need to put in the steps every day, so a little bit of sweat did us good.
The trip to Chiang Mai was uneventful, fortunately. Any time you can say that when driving in Thailand is a good thing. The most interesting thing that happened was when we were approached at a rest stop by a herd of friendly cats. I took several photos and got some good ones, but herding cats and getting them to pose is not an easy task!
We went to a Central mall for supper, and looked for a hotel while we were eating. Unfortunately the usual hotel we stay at in Chiang Mai was booked solid, so we found an alternative nearby in the Old City.
We like staying in the Old City in Chiang Mai because we can park the car (or motorcycle) and walk around, although when I had my motorcycle there, parking was way less of a hassle, so I did still use it. We ended up parking the car for two days and only walking.
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