The Day I Decided to Start a Travel Blog (a.k.a. Getting to Sukhothai)

Day 4: It’s time to travel to Sukhothai for a couple days. Sukhothai is in north central Thailand and was under Khmer rule until the late 1100’s when it seceded from the empire. Many modern historians consider this the beginning of Thailand as little is known about the history of this particular area prior to this time. The new city is about 12 km east of the historic city and this is my destination for the night.

I start off my morning in Ayutthaya, where my hotel had arranged for a tuk tuk to come take me to the train station. A tuk tuk is an open air small covered truck where you and your things ride in the back on benches.

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Where yesterday’s train was open air with open seating, this train is air conditioned with assigned seats. While I’m sure that more often than not, one could walk up and buy train tickets at the station, I bought almost all of mine ahead of time so that I could ensure the timing and know that there would not be a language barrier. I used a couple different sites depending on the route, but this ticket was bought from Bus Online Ticket for 485THB (about $16). Their site is in English and they emailed me my receipt with instructions on the train policies along with a .pdf attachment that was my actual ticket. Take note, as of Sept 2018, you were still required to have print outs of the tickets for the conductors on board.

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The trip from Ayutthaya to Phitsanulok (the closest train station ) is about 3 1/2 hours. There is a meal served on board, but I’d recommend that if you’re a picky eater, grab some coffee and snacks from the convenience store and streetside eateries across the street from the train station. The train is cool and clean and it’s easy enough to navigate the train car/seat assignments on the ticket (that’s the only thing I really understand on the ticket, the rest is in Thai). There is room for small luggage overhead.

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OK, here it is, my inspiration for starting a blog….just took me a year to get to it! This is an actual snapshot of my Facebook post from this day. Those of you who know me, know that I’m a planner, as in, I had a 38 page .pdf that contained all my plans, tickets, confirmations, passport scans, insurance info, etc that got stored in the cloud before I left. In this case, I was winging it as I’d decided to go all the way to New Sukhothai in one day, so didn’t really have a good transfer from train to bus plan.

The bus ride was only an hour and there were many tuk tuks waiting upon its arrival. The costs were clearly posted on the vehicle, and it was about $2 for a ride to my hotel. Let’s talk about my hotel, the Ruean Thai Hotel….it GORGEOUS and clean with friendly staff for about $29. The pool beckoned me about 10 minutes after I arrived, as even in September it was well into the 90’s (°F). It also came with a hot breakfast served in the hotel restaurant.

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There aren’t a lot of sights to see in the New City, but there aren’t great restaurant choices in the Old City where I am headed tomorrow, so I decided to wander further into the town for some drinks and dinner. I checked out TripAdvisor and found a highly recommended pizza restaurant descriptively called Pizza House. It was about a 20 minute walk, so I set off walking, phone GPS in hand. The restaurant’s Facebook page has pictures of the menu and food, but the location shown isn’t correct (it is correct on Trip Advisor). We can all argue over pineapple on pizza, but I’ve eaten pineapple at almost every meal since I arrived, so it seemed wrong not to eat it on my pizza! The pizza was a nice treat cooked right in the outside pizza oven (and cost as much as almost all my previous days of food combined at about $10.) After dinner, I stopped at a nearby rooftop bar for a beer and to watch the people go by before I wandered back to my hotel for the evening.

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Time for bed, I move again tomorrow to the old town of Sukhothai right outside of the historical park….