Sukhothai

A group of us decided to visit Sukhothai . Sukhothai is one of Thailand’s ancient capitals. Like most of these former capitals it is plush with ancient ruins of beautiful temples and tons of historical sites. Steff, I and a group of friends from Mae Sot decided to bus down there and rent some motorbikes and take in the sites. If we thought riding a bicycle through Mae Sot was hair raising, then we found driving a motorcycle through a busy tourist city to be just plain dangerous (but fun).
We drove to the Sukhothai main ruin and explored. Steff found a tiny cave where she hide out waiting to scare us as we passed by. However, she did not manage to scare one of us, but rather a random Thai tourist. Within minutes we were dripping sweat and began to miss the “cool” climate of Mae Sot up in the mountains. We could only handle a couple hours in the mid-day heat before we found some shade and cold beer. But before we could leave, Steff got her first taste of motorbike driving (around a moat). She managed not to fall in.

Later that night we returned for an awesome light show at the light-up ruins. There were glowing Buddhas and stone buildings. So beautiful looking at night. We happening upon a traditional Thai dance, music show. Where we saw dozens of these large floating candle lanterns released into the sky in intervals to create this glowing star-like pattern as they floated off into the night sky.
We capped off the night by eating at the Poo restaurant haha. We befriended a Thai ladyboy and had some interesting chats about the Indian caste system with our northern Indian friend.

The next day we drove about an hour outside of town to see some more ruins. Steff and I really just wanted to drive motorbikes. I rode on the back of the bike for the first time with Steff the whole way home (her first time going over 2nd gear). I was scared at first, we did almost get bucked off the bike the first steep hill we went up, but then she started to get the hang of it and is a motorbike natural.

On our way home we piled into a small, old, rusty van. We got about 10 meters before the van died. The next hour was spent watching the driver kicking and cursing at the engine trying to get it started again. We were unsure that this old bucket of bolts would get us up the mountains to Mae Sot, sure enough an hour up the mountain the van started to shake and make some crazy noises and some strange smells and died again on the side of a steep mountain. Luckily the van that jumped us early followed us the whole way (sometimes positioning themselves behind us to break our roll if we did not make it up the mountain). Luckily we broke down near a mechanic. The van was beyond repair, so they called another van from Mae Sot to pick us up. It was dark by then. As we waited we noticed a small stall a few feet down the road where we purchased some cold drinks. The husband came out and started to dance with us and the wife animatedly with gestures asked Nikki if she was a prostitute and kept hugging her repeatedly. Quite a strange moment.Finally the new van arrived. This van defiantly was not a bucket of bolts (we even had air con). This driver however, seemed to be a professional drag racer and scared the shit out of us by driving up the mo