North to Sukhothai

Finally a day without an alarm going off at an ungodly hour of the morning! We were both still up by 8am though, packing and heading downstairs ahead of the trip to the station. Quick hotel breakfast and off we went.

Managed to get lucky and the second cabbie we spoke to was willing to use the meter going to the station, so our trip was only 60 baht instead of the 150 the first guy wanted. As I said, taxi drivers are the worst thing about Bangkok, closely followed by the traffic.

Our train showed up and left right on time at 10am which was nice, and it was fairly comfortable too. We weren't squashed in, and were given a "meal" though it was just rice, a packet of chicken teriyaki type stuff and then another packet of mackerel in chilli sauce which we both passed on. All up fairly comfortable, and even the bathroom was clean. The 5.5 hour trip north across Thailand passed without incident.

Hopped off in the small city of Phitsanulok, where we waited about 20 minutes for a minivan heading to Old Sukhothai, as opposed to New Sukhothai. This ride was pretty awful since we were wedged on a temporary seat right at the back of the van (basically where the luggage should be), and had no foot room at all. At least it was only an hour.

We quickly moved seats when some people got off in New Sukhothai, though 10 minutes later the driver blasted through Old Sukhothai without stopping. We did some yelling and eventually he pulled over to let us off, but it meant a 20 minute walk back through town in the late afternoon heat which was kind of annoying. At least we'd made it!

Our guesthouse was nice though a little rustic. We spent a bit of time settling in and cooling down, then headed back to the main road for some dinner. Lots of tourist-looking restaurants with fairly identical menus, so we just picked the busiest one. Still not great unfortunately! Shandos said her dish was okay, but my curry was awful and flavourless. I've always said that the shorter the menu, the better the food, and this restaurant had probably 300+ dishes on the menu (Thai, Chinese, Italian, pizza, sandwiches, burgers etc). At least the beer was cheap!Read more