Sukhothai

The journey by train from Bangkok to Phitsanulok in the north of Thailand was a cheap and thoroughly enjoyable experience. The day before my intended departure I went to Hua Lamphong station to book my ticket with all the important info I had collected online. It had to be Train 51, Chiang Mai bound, upper berth, no air conditioning, for the sum of 409 baht. Upper berth was fine. It is the cheapest category. It has no window and limited space but as I would travel at night that was of no concern. The booking was a breeze with a minimum of red tape and after that I had lunch at the air conditioned food court inside the station which did a fantastic pork noodle soup.

The next day I checked out and took the river taxi to Hua Lamphung. After boarding the train I found my berth and made myself comfortable. Not long after the train left, the conductor checked my ticket and it wasn’t before long that the monotonous noise that is typical of train travel sent me to sleep.

The night train to Phitsanulok

I arrived in Phitsanulok very early in the morning and I waited at the station till it got light. From there I had to walk to the bus station where I took a bus to New Sukhothai. So far everything went according to plan.

Sukothai was formerly the capital of Thailand (1238 – 1438) and is famous for its architecture and classical Thai art. For less than a dollar I rented a bicycle that was really only fit for children, but with my knees all over the place, it got me around. The grounds were nicely kept and some shady trees made for a nice picnic area where I ate my lunch of deep fried chicken. It tasted awful.

Old Sukhothai photos. Another UNESCO world heritage site.

Life in Sukhothai proved to be cheap. Sticky rice with minced meat for 15 baht. Lunch and dinner averaged between 30 and 40 baht. Deliciously soft durian pieces for 100 baht. After the first day I moved to a cheap hotel where I paid 200 baht per night and it proved great value for money. It was clean, quiet and spacious. It even had a small coach and I was provided with towels, toilet paper and reasonable wifi. It was the kind of hotel that made me happy.

Custard apple or sweetsop

At a small roadside stall not far form my hotel I bought some fruit that I thought was soursop. But if you google it a lot of images turn up that look very different from the one above. I’ve eaten soursop before in Malaysia and Indonesia where it is known as durian belanda because is resembles a rather large and prickly fruit not unlike the true durian. The custard apples, which are related to the soursop, were smaller and had no soft spikes. The flesh was deliciously sweet and creamy. It was very soft. Something I only noticed when I got up and found out I had accidently sat on one and had squashed it.

Cycling among the rice fields that surround Old Sukhothai.

From Sukhothai I took a night bus back to Bangkok’s Mo Chitt bus terminal. From there I took the subway to the city centre.

Old photograph in the MRT station showing a rickshaw in front of Hua Lamphung station

Some weeks before, I had bought a flight back to the Netherlands for a short sojourn to visit family and friends. I would fly with the budget carrier Norwegian Air. It was very cheap, but I kept receiving ominous, almost threatening, emails, warning me that I had not reserved a seat and in that case the airline would assign me a seat. The general gist was it wouldn’t be a nice one. Possibly in the middle of the aircraft, in between screaming children and fat people next to me, falling asleep, leaning over me and drooling in my lap… No meals were included so I had brought some chocolate bars and peanuts. To be on the safe side I had filled a water bottle in the transit area of Suvarnabhumi airport in Bangkok. In the end the flight was rather painless and even comfortable. I had a layover in Stockholm and from there it was cattle class to Amsterdam where I arrived tired but with a minimum loss of money.

Thai times

From Battambang in Cambodia I first travelled to Poipet with a sleeper bus. The bus was run by cowboys. They were raucous young men. They laughed and played loud music over the speakers. So loud that tremors ran through the whole bus that left everything and  everybody in it vibrating with the singsong of Cambodian celebrities who were jubilating their new found love. I asked them politely to turn it down as I wasn’t really ready to share the joy of Cambodian love making that early in the morning. After they had complied with my request, I lay down again and looked some more at the Cambodian countryside even though I’d seen a lot of Cambodian countryside by then.

Poipet is a Cambodian border town and synonymous with corrupt officials and an extortionate taxi mafia. But this is mainly a problem coming from the Thai side. Travelling from the Cambodian side, the border crossing was a painless affair with just the usual queueing, the filling out of forms and officials stamping documents. At the Cambodian side they wanted my fingerprints which I generously granted and at the other side the Thai wanted my photograph and so I tried to look my best. Welcome to Thailand.

From the border to Bangkok I travelled in a minibus but the driver was the worst ever. When we got closer to Bangkok the roads became more congested and our driver sped over the shoulder lane overtaking left and right. Several times he attempted shortcuts and once we drove over quiet country lanes until we came to a standstill before a lake. Then we turned around and drove back to the highway. In Bangkok we were unceremoniously dropped off far away from where I wanted to be. It was probably close to where the driver lived…

Me and my sister

In Bangkok I met my sister and her family who were on holiday. They had a wonderful hotel with air conditioning, a swimming pool and rooms that contained more than one piece of furniture. Together we walked through the city and I bought a durian because I thought they wouldn’t like it so I could eat the whole delicious fruit by myself, but they did like it and that made me very proud. Most people wouldn’t even try it because of the smell. Then we had dinner and we had green curries and pad thai.

It was a great success.

watercolour tuk tuk, digitally pimped with GIMP

 

Next: Sukhothai

More Battambang for your buck

The next day I rented a bicycle. It was one of those crappy Chinese bicycles which seemed more suitable for children than as a serious means of transportation. It was way too small for me. But then it cost only one dollar for a day and the temple I wanted to visit was only eight kilometres or so away.

Cat in a temple, watercolour

The temple was called Wat Ek Phnom and was built next to a lotus pond. Very atmospheric and access was only one dollar. Inside the dangerously crumbling building there were some offerings of lotus flowers. Some children were holding out a small dish to me and urging me to put some money in it.  Then an old woman came in and chased the children away.

After having exhausted the possibilities of exploration I had lunch in a small stall next to the entrance. Not far away, on the grounds of a modern day temple, there were some girls and young men gathering the drying rice together with wooden rakes hoping to get it in before the rain would come. Barefoot, with their straw heads and wooden rakes, they looked very much like actors in a historical tableau vivant.

After a few more days in Battambang, I travelled onward to Bangkok.

Bats, temples and catfish

From Phnom Penh I took a bus to Battambang.

It’s one of those conundrums of travelling: how long to stay somewhere? If you want to visit A, B and C in, say, fifteen days, what would be the best way to allocate your time? You arrive at A and you think it’s really nice, so you might be tempted to spend more than the average five days, but maybe you will find out later that B or C, or maybe both, were in fact much nicer and you should’ve stayed longer there. It is impossible to know beforehand.

To bring some maths to travel you could have a look at this numberphile video. It is about how to optimally choose a toilet when visiting a festival. You don’t have to be a genius to see it is easily applicable to a wide range of other decisions we have to make in life, like the one I mentioned above. If we rank the attractiveness of several destinations, for example,  then we can look at all possible permutations and come up with a good method to optimise spending our time in the right places.

Maybe if I had paid more attention to that video I would have spent more time in Battambang rather than in Phnom Penh. It was just quieter, friendlier and easier to move around and to have a look at the countryside. The reason I stayed in Phnom Penh was its allure because, after all, it is the capital, where everything is happening. An old Lonely Planet guidebook described it as laid back, the Pearl of Asia, blah blah blah, whereas I thought it was frantic and chaotic.

Cambodian cow, watercolour

The first day in Battambang I took a remork (the Cambodian style tuk-tuk), to get around to the more outlying sights. There was the fishing village where there wasn’t really anything to see or to do. We stopped at a small bridge where we got out and crossed the river. Then we looked around. Nothing. We walked back to the tuk tuk and drove back to the main road. Nothing there either but a tiny food stall that sold rice with catfish. The fish was fresh and delicious. When I had finished most of my fish, I asked my driver if I could eat the head. He took the head of my fish, put it in his mouth and ate it. Yes, very good, he said, smacking his lips.

In a nearby temple I walked around and took some pictures. The ones above show three statues with together six faces that I thought were really nice. Much of the iconography in Cambodian temples has come with early Indian scholars who brought Buddhism together with Hindu customs and folklore. The one on the left with the blue face I thought must be Vishnu. The one on the right with the four faces could be Brahma, the Hindu creator god. I don’t know who the bloke in the middle is.

Then we drove to Prasat Banan, an Angkor era temple on a hill. It was a bit of a climb up the stairs but on top there was a good view of the surrounding countryside and a nice breeze. Later I read that one should explore with caution as parts of the mountain are not as of yet demined and there might still be unexploded ordnance lying around.

feeding catfish

When we left, my driver showed me a small section of the pond where he threw some fodder in the water. In no time the water was crawling with catfish. The only aim in life for a catfish is to grow as big and as ugly as possible.

Then we drove to Phnom Sapeou where I walked around. It is famous for a cave where the Khmer Rouge committed some more atrocities. I wasn’t particularly interested, but I had to wait till about six o’clock anyway for the bats to come out of their cave.

This swarming of bats from the nearby cave was a neat natural phenomenon. Everybody was sitting, many with a beer in their hands, chatting and waiting. Then the bats started coming out in a long ribbon. People pointed with their fingers and cameras started clicking. Then more bats. And more. It just went on. Then after ten or fifteen minutes people got up and started to leave. My driver told me the swarming would go on for another hour and there were about 6,5 million of them. That’s a lot of bats.
Go back? he said.
Yeah, let’s go back, I said.
And we went back to Battambang.

A lot of bats.