Hello again family and friends! This is the site for my new travel blog that will follow my travels through Thailand. This time I will be accompanied by my good friend, Brent Whitley. We will be traveling for 15 days. I will try to update this site as much as I can throughout the trip. Happy New Year everybody and see you when I return!
-Alec
January 23, 2010
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Temple Ruins of the Siam Kingdom
January 23, 2010
Day 12
We arrived in Sukhothai by bus on the evening of Jan 22. We were in the central plains of Thailand. The landscapes were vast with crops, hills, and small homes. Sukhothai is split into the New Town and the Old Town. The New Town has the bus terminals, bigger restaurants, more hotels, etc. The Old Town has all of the ancient ruins spread through it and some small hostels for travelers passing through the city to see it’s historical sites. We stayed at the Mountain View Guesthouse about 10 min away from the Old and New town. It was very isolated and set at the base of the foothills. It’s owned by an englishman and his Thai wife who run the guesthouse independently, cook their own meals for everyone, and take the guests out to the main entrance of the ruins for no cost. That evening we arrived too late to see anything because they close the historic park down at nightfall so we had a meal at the guesthouse restaurant and got some rest.
The next day, Malcolm (the owner), dropped us off at the main entrance of the park. The park is split up into 5 zones with temple ruins to be seen everywhere. We tried to see as much as we could in one day and what helped us were the bikes we rented to use to get around the park faster. It was less than a $1 to rent the bikes for the day. So we hit 3 zones that day and saw some amazing things. We spent the whole day seeing one zone then riding back to the Old Town to get a bite to eat or a drink, then back into the park to see another zone. The temple ruins were incredible. I’m not familiar enough with ancient asian architecture so the sight of these gigantic structures with pillars and pointed tips and giant buddha’s around every corner was overwhelming.
After several hours of sightseeing, we returned our bikes and took a tuk-tuk back to the guesthouse, packed our things, and Malcolm dropped us off at the New Town bus station where we caught the next bus departing to Bangkok.
