Saturday, November 13, 2021
7:30 a.m. Room S5, Orchid Hibiscus Guest House
Sukhothai, Thailand
A full day and two nights have passed since I arrived in Sukhothai. For a variety of reasons, I wasn’t able to write down the story of my scooter trip from Tak City to Sukhothai. And that’s fine, in fact, because it wasn’t a very eventful day.
I had spent some time plotting a complicated route along small countryside roads, but at the last minute, I decided to just take the main highway. I was worried that by turning the trip into some kind of small adventure on the small roads that I’d use up the energy I was going to need to truly appreciate Sukhothai. A simple ride down Highway 12 with all my focus on Sukhothai seemed the wiser choice. Even if I shot video during the entire day, I probably would never find the time to edit it anyway. I’m dealing with a major time issue as far as YouTube video editing goes.
With that decision made, I relaxed and took advantage of the breakfast that they offered at the Dome Thong. That was an interesting experience. The breakfast was served in a small room beside the office. It was furnished in the style of an uncomfortable living room in someone’s house. This room wasn’t air conditioned, and, for some reason, they had closed the door and all the windows. And the large hot water heater had brought the temperature and the dampness of that room to swampy rainforest levels. It was so hot and humid in there that I found it difficult to breathe. And the windows were dripping with condensation. The room had been transformed into a sauna.
Breakfast was about as simple as a breakfast can be: hot water for instant coffee plus toast and butter and jam. And that was it. I didn’t mind, though. I had already had two cups of coffee in my room, so I didn’t feel like having any more. And I just sat down and munched through at least eight slices of toast. Maybe ten or twelve. I can’t remember exactly how many I had. And I felt much better with that bit of food in my stomach. Then I packed up and hit the road.
I didn’t even bother to find small streets leading out of Tak City. I took the busy main bypass highway that runs through the city to the intersection with Highway 12. I was keeping my life as simple as possible, and once I was on Highway 12, I just kept riding until I arrived at the turn-off for old Sukhothai. It was only then that I slowed down and started to explore a little bit.
At the turn-off, there was a monument to King Si Inthrathit, the founder of the Sukhothai Kingdom. I went for a stroll around the monument and took some pictures of the statue and shot a little video as I tried to recall what I remembered about Si Inthrathit. From there, Highway 12 went straight through the heart of old Sukhothai. It looked to me like it went right through the official Historical Park as well, and I was curious how that would work out. Despite all the reading I had done, I still didn’t have a clear image in my head of the exact borders of the Historical Park and how it was organized. Because of that, I spent my first hour and a half in the town simply riding my scooter around. It was too early to check in at the guest house, so I simply went exploring.
I realized right away that the boundaries of the Historical Park itself were demarcated with a metal fence. Inside that fenced-in area was the park. And you gained entrance to that area by buying a ticket. But this area was just a small portion of the total land enclosed by the old city walls and moats themselves. It was exactly like the situation in Kamphaeng Phet where there was the modern city proper extending for several kilometers in all directions. Then inside that area, you found a much smaller area enclosed by the old city walls and moats and fortifications. And inside THAT, you found the historical park, set off by a modern fence. And, just like in Kamphaeng Phet, there wasn’t just one section of the historical park. Based on what I saw while riding around, there were three places where you would have to present a ticket to enter. And then, of course, there were many other ruins scattered all over the place throughout the city and the countryside. It was not as easy as just going to the historical park. Even defining what was a part of the historical park and what wasn’t was a complicated issue. Local people that I talked to referred to everything around me as a part of the park. Yet, in my head, I was thinking only of the places surrounded by fences and requiring a ticket as the park.
I was most interested in the city walls at this point. I had had such a good experience exploring the walls of Kamphaeng Phet that I wanted to compare them to the walls of Sukhothai. And I was surprised at the differences. I don’t know why they were so different. Perhaps the walls at Sukhothai are much older, but they were certainly much more worn down. In most places, there was no evidence of laterite bricks at all. The wall appeared as simply a low mound of dirt with a lot of trees growing out of it. Another big difference concerned the moat. At Kamphaeng Phet, there was a single moat going around the entire city on the outside of the walls. But at Sukhothai, there was a moat on the outside and a moat on the inside of the main wall. And though I didn’t see any evidence of this myself, the official map shows three entirely separate walls. And the two moats were in between the walls. Therefore, there would have been an outer wall with no moat beyond it. Yet, I didn’t see that final outer wall or the inner wall. I just saw what remained of the middle wall plus the two moats.
I rode my scooter around the entire city wall to try to understand how the city walls related to the fence enclosing the Historical Park. And it took some time, but I finally got it somewhat straight in my head. It is confusing because the maps don’t generally show the fence of the park at all. The main map is labelled “Map of Sukhothai Historical Park.” Yet, it doesn’t show just the park itself. It shows the entire walled city plus much of the surrounding countryside. And I’m thinking now that that is probably accurate. In this case, they would be thinking of the park as defined by the UNESCO World Heritage Site. And all of the ruins would fall underneath that umbrella, NOT just the ones that you have to buy a ticket to see. In fact, when I first arrived in Sukhothai on Highway 12, I passed a very interesting ruin on the left side. I recognized that it had distinct characteristics of Khmer architecture. I pulled over on my scooter to get a closer look, and I learned that this was the Ta Pha Daeng Shrine, one of the three remaining Khmer structures that gets special billing. It is even described in detail on the main brochure for the Historical Park. It’s one of the most important sites in Sukhothai. Yet, you don’t need to buy a ticket to see it. It is just out in the open at the side of the road. Considering its importance, it definitely should be inside the fence with the other significant ruins, but the way the city is laid out with Highway 12 cutting right through it, it had to be left on the outside along with some other important ruins.
This is the key fact about Sukhothai that was confusing me so much, and I was glad to get this figured out. The problem is that the term Sukhothai Historical Park is used in three different ways. One, there is the Sukhothai Historical Park as described by UNESCO and its World Heritage Site system. That includes everything, even ruins that are many kilometers away from the city center. Two, there is the main Sukhothai Historical Park enclosed by the fence inside the city walls. Most people think of just that when they are talking about the Historical Park. But, three, in many other situations, the term Sukhothai Historical Park refers to the three ticketed areas: the main park; Wat Si Chum; and Wat Phra Phai Luang. But now they have even separated those three areas, and there is an individual ticket for each one. And I think they each continue to use the name Sukhothai Historical Park and the exact same ticket for each. It’s total confusion as far as naming goes.
In fact, I started to discover all of this myself just by accident as I rode around exploring. While I followed the inner path of the city walls, I found myself at the various gates into the city. There are four of them, and they each led outside the city to other important ruins. The northern gate was the main entrance to the city, and I rode through that gate to find a second large moat with an island in the center. This, I found out, was Wat Phra Phai Luang. There was a narrow pedestrian bridge leading across the moat to the island, but to go there, you had to first buy a ticket at a ticket booth. I had no plans to actually visit any of these places upon my arrival, so I simply read the signs and checked the place out and moved on.
But then I saw that I was quite near Wat Si Chum. This temple is famous for many reasons, one of which is that it contained the largest Buddha image in Sukhothai. I still had plenty of time before I could check in at the hotel, so I thought I could round out my day and even my video of the day by visiting this temple. I knew I was going to visit this temple during my time in Sukhothai, so why not do it right now while it was convenient? I made my way to Wat Si Chum, but to my surprise, it had another ticket booth. Since it was a single temple, I assumed it would be out in the open just as the Ta Pha Daeng Shrine had been. But it was enclosed by a fence, and to go inside the fence, you had to buy a ticket. By this point, I think I had it straight in my head, and I concluded that there were three ticketed sections in the Historical Park. There might have been a fourth or even more, but I didn’t think so. I didn’t have a naming system figured out, but it turns out that was because there wasn’t a sensible naming system. Everything was just called the Historical Park regardless of what it was or even where it was.
The last thing I wanted to figure out was the location of the Ramkhamhaeng National Museum. From the maps I had seen, it looked like the museum was inside the Historical Park, and I wanted to figure out if I needed to buy a ticket for the Park in order to visit the museum. Maybe the ticket for the Historical Park also granted you access to the museum. The museum was also a bit tricky to locate. The problem was that the name on the building didn’t say Ramkhamhaeng National Museum at all. It said Lai Sue Thai Memorial Building. And I didn’t know what that was. But I did some investigating, and I figured out that this was the National Museum. It just so happened that the museum itself was made up of several separate buildings, and the first building you entered was called the Lai Sue Thai Memorial Building (which was named after the Thai script that Ramkhamhaeng invented). So, that’s the sign they put on the building. And that led to more confusion for me. However, it was clear that the museum was just on the outside of the Historical Park fence, so it was possible to go to the museum without entering the park itself. I was glad to at least figure that out.
At this point, I have to say that I wasn’t really that pleased with Sukhothai. I tried not to do it, but I couldn’t help but compare the place to my experience of Kamphaeng Phet. And Kamphaeng Phet had pleased me immensely. Going there felt special. It felt like a real city. It was a real Thai city with local people just going about their lives. And this genuine city just happened to have some ancient ruins in it. Sukhothai, by contrast, felt like a theme park. It felt a bit fake. Everything there was built around the ruins. It felt like everything that was there existed only to serve the visitors to the Historical Park. It was more Disneyland than real city. Even the main street leading away from the entrance to the park felt fake. It was bright and colorful and kind of fun, but still somewhat artificial. It actually reminded me of the streets you find at beach towns, streets that are designed to provide tourists with the things they need. And while I was at the museum, a number of people called out to me from across the street. They were renting bicycles or selling umbrellas or driving electric vehicles for the park. And they were all trying to get my attention in order to sell me something or offer me their services. This didn’t bother me. But it still highlighted the nature of this town as a tourist town and perhaps only a tourist town, and none of this happened in Kamphaeng Phet.
My short ride to the Orchid Hibiscus Guest House emphasized the tourist-oriented nature of Sukhothai because the hotel was situated on a road and in an entire neighborhood that consisted of nothing but hotels. This whole area outside the old city walls was a collection of hotels and restaurants for tourists and nothing else. I was pleased when I arrived at the Orchid Hibiscus, though. It had character. It had clearly been around for a while, and this age had given it some rough edges. I liked that.
A woman was waiting for me when I rode my scooter through the gate. I understood that this hotel was owned and operated by a married couple: a man from Italy and a Thai woman. I didn’t see the Italian man when I arrived, but I got the sense that this woman was his wife and one of the owners. Checking in was straightforward except that she was quite serious about figuring out the validity period of my current visa, but she didn’t seem to know how to do it. This had been happening a lot lately. Even the soldiers at the checkpoints on the roads had done this. They wanted to confirm that I had a valid visa. Yet, they didn’t seem to know how to track down this information. The soldiers and this woman both flipped through my passport to get to the TI form, which is a square of white paper that you get when you first arrive in Thailand. It records the date you entered the country. But it is not a visa and has nothing to do with your official visa status or how long you can stay in the country. But they keep looking at just that card, and they get confused because I entered Thailand in 2020, long ago, and that is the date on the TI form. They think I’m in the country illegally because of that. But then I have to take my passport from them and flip through the pages to get to the actual visa stamps and show them my latest valid visa with the expiry date. It puzzles me that they don’t know how to do this. Surely, they check passports constantly and have done so for years. Why wouldn’t they have figured this out by now? There’s no way they could understand the differences between all the many visa types available, but it’s reasonable to think that by now they would understand what an actual visa stamp is as compared to the TI form. That’s pretty basic.
Anway, I was checked in once we confirmed that my visa was valid. I keep wondering if I will be asked about my vaccination status. I’m actually eager to present my vaccination certificate and vaccine passport. A lot of effort went into getting those documents, and if you believed what you read in the media, having them would be essential. I was expecting that restaurants and hotels would ask to see your vaccine passport in order to allow you to stay there. But it never comes up. That’s actually a bit disappointing. I want to show it at least once. But I guess it will become important for leaving the country and going through airports. But that’s about it. Inside Thailand proper, despite the hype and the non-stop media coverage, it appears to be a non-issue.
The Orchid Hibiscus was listed as having a pool, and I was pleased to see that the pool was open and was in very good condition. I’m not a huge pool guy, but if it’s convenient and the pool isn’t crowded, I don’t mind going for a swim. The woman said that I could choose between two rooms. One room was located in the front area near the entrance and the swimming pool. It was clearly older and one of the original rooms of the guest house. The second room was newer and was located in the back. It didn’t take me long to make up my mind. The new room was far nicer. It felt airy and spacious and light whereas the older room felt small and cramped and dark by comparison. Plus, the new room had nicer furniture and it had a mini-fridge. The old room didn’t have a fridge. I said that I preferred the new room, and I quickly moved in and unpacked.
I was very pleased with this room and very pleased with the Orchid Hibiscus overall. There were just a few minor issues. These were just weird things that speak more to my quirks than anything else perhaps. For one thing, there was no “Do Not Disturb” sign to hang on the outside of the door. I didn’t even think of this at the time, but I was surprised when I came back to my room the next day after my trip to the museum to find that my room had been cleaned and everything changed. I generally tell hotel staff to leave my room alone. It doesn’t need to be cleaned every day. And I prefer to just be left in peace. So it actually came as a surprise to find my room had been cleaned. And for me, it was an unpleasant surprise.
For one thing, I had left all my electronics all over the bed, as I always do. My laptop and hard drives and camera gear and everything you can think of had been spread all over the bed and the comforter. It never occurred to me that someone would want to change the bedsheets, so I hadn’t organized my room for cleaning. But they had come in to do so, and they would have had to have moved my laptop and everything else. I also always move the furniture around to make rooms more suitable for me. I like to have a bedside table in a certain position to be convenient for my cup of coffee and chargers. I like to have chairs and tables in certain places to be nearer to electrical outlets. But then while cleaning, they pushed everything back to where it was originally. And I had to move it all again.
Plus, they took away my nice bedsheet. That was pretty amusing. When I first moved in, I was very happy to see that this bed had a very comfortable and thick top sheet made of 100% cotton. That’s so rare in Thailand, and I love having a sheet like that. I had even just bought my own bed sheet in Mae Sot and brought it on this trip. It isn’t 100% cotton, but it gets the job done and it was the best I could find. But I didn’t need this sheet because the bed in this room had a much nicer sheet already on it. But when they cleaned the room, they took away the sheet to wash it, and they hadn’t replaced it. So now the bed didn’t have any top sheets at all. It had one when I moved in. But then it was gone. It was weird. Plus, when I moved into the room, I was happy to discover that the towels were thick 100% cotton towels. They feel so great against my skin. I looked forward to having those towels during my stay. But when they cleaned the room, they took away those towels and replaced them with fresh ones. But these fresh towels were not cotton. They were made of some kind of strange nylon and were not nearly as nice. Plus, I feel weird about waste. When I stay in a hotel, I often just use my own soap and shampoo. Why open all those annoying little hotel packets when you don’t have to? But this time, I had opened up one of the soaps and one of the shampoo packets. And I had left them out for future use. I only use a tiny bit of shampoo each time, and I planned to use that same packet of shampoo for several days in a row. But when they cleaned the bathroom, they took away all the packets I had opened and just left brand new unopened ones. I disliked the idea that they were throwing away perfectly good soap and shampoo when there was no need.
After I saw all this, I made sure to talk to the owner and tell her that they didn’t need to clean my room anymore. They could just leave it alone during my time here. She was worried about this at first, but I honestly can’t see the point of washing sheets and towels every single day after using them just once. That seems so wasteful and pointless, and I insisted. She also wanted to put in fresh water bottles every day, but that also seems pointless. I have my own big jug of water, so I don’t need those tiny water bottles every day. In most hotels, I just end up with a big collection of full water bottles that I leave behind along with all the soap and shampoo packets and toilet paper. I don’t use any of it. Perhaps that habit comes from years of staying in cheap backpacker lodgings where they don’t supply any of that anyway. I’ve always just used all my own stuff, even my own sheet and towel.
My plan all along was to devote my first full day in Sukhothai to a trip to the Ramkhamhaeng National Museum. I’d figured out where it was, and I just needed to hop on the scooter and go there after breakfast. The Orchid Hibiscus serves a nice breakfast in the morning, so I ended up with a relatively late start to my day because of that. On my own, I’d probably just have instant coffee as soon as I wake up, and then I’d head out into the city right after and not eat until lunch or dinner. But it made sense to take advantage of this breakfast. In fact, I think I was the only guest in the hotel, and the owner asked me specifically what time I wanted to have breakfast. And that made sense for her. There’s no point having a breakfast ready from seven until ten in the morning if she has only one guest and she doesn’t even know if that guest will want breakfast. I ended up choosing eight in the morning at random as my breakfast time. It seemed reasonable. Not too early. Not too late. And there was just one place setting on the tables when I showed up.
It was a nice breakfast. She served me a hot cup of brewed coffee. And she brought out a special rice snack wrapped up in a banana leaf. This was served with as much toast as I wanted, with butter and three types of marmalade presented in nice jars with wooden serving utensils. There was also a boat of fresh honey with an actual piece of honeycomb (with bees still attached). And then I was served my choice of fried or scrambled eggs with a big plate of sliced pineapple. It was a very nice breakfast, much nicer than any breakfast I would ever have or make on my own.
My museum trip got further delayed when I discovered after breakfast that my cameras weren’t ready to go. I thought I had cleared out some memory cards, but I guess I hadn’t. And I had to spend two or three hours working on that, just copying video files from cards to hard drives and organizing everything and clearing up some memory. I just haven’t had any time to edit and upload any YouTube videos, so I haven’t been able to clear out any old files. I’ve had to keep nearly all my video going as far back as Kamphaeng Phet. And that meant all my memory cards were full. It was a real chore to get this figured out. In the end, I gave up on the morning entirely, and I resigned myself to visiting the museum in the afternoon.
My museum experience was a bit of a mixed bag. I know I shouldn’t compare one town with another and one museum with another, but I couldn’t help it, and I kept contrasting my time at the Sukhothai museum with the one in Kamphaeng Phet, and the Sukhothai museum came up short in that comparison. For one thing, there were many more rules and restrictions. They had lockers in the lobby, and you were required to leave your bags behind. They were quite clear about this rule and they enforced it. Plus, no video was allowed at all. You were allowed to take pictures, but you couldn’t use a tripod or a flash or take any video (which they called moving pictures). I shot some video outside the museum as a kind of introduction, but that was all I could do. I had to put my GoPro away for the rest of my time there.
I was also disappointed to discover that the museum wasn’t air conditioned. I was hot and uncomfortable and sweaty for my whole visit. The first room was also a disappointment. They really didn’t put their best foot forward by making that room the first thing you see on your visit. I thought that if this room was setting the tone for the museum, then there was not going to be much there. There really wasn’t anything much of interest in that room, and no effort had been made to convey any kind of overall context or perspective for the content of the museum and its exhibits. They did have a big scale model of the entire city. It was one of those models with lights built into them to mark the important places. You could press labelled buttons at the front in order to have lights turn on somewhere on the model to show where that place was located. But the model was so large in scale that you couldn’t really see much detail. It was fun to press the buttons, but that was about it. I was amused to note that the button and the light for the park’s main attraction – Wat Mahathat – was the one button that was broken. I guess it got the most use, and because of that, it wore out and broke.
The main exhibits were in the second building, and this museum clearly had a much more extensive collection of items than the museum in Kamphaeng Phet. A lot of the major items were replicas with the originals being at the museum in Bangkok, but there were enough original items on display to far overshadow the collection in Kamphaeng Phet. However, little to no context was provided for understanding their significance. It felt to me a bit like a warehouse of stuff. There was a bunch of stuff inside nicely lit display cases, and there were a lot of lists of names and dates, but I didn’t come away from my visit with any sense that I had learned anything.
What really surprised me about this museum was that no connection was made with the Historical Park itself. It felt like the two were completely separate. All of the items on display had some connection to the period of history during which the Sukhothai Kingdom existed, but there was nothing in the museum that was intended to guide or enrich your experience of visiting the park. And it seems to me that that should be its most important function. It’s great that it had a bunch of stuff from the Sukhothai Kingdom, but most people would visit this museum just before or just after their visit to the Historical Park itself, and I think most people would be hoping for displays and exhibits directly connected to the park. But there were very few, if any at all.
Personally, I wanted to know more about the city walls, the city gates, and the moats. I wanted to know about how they were designed and how they were built. How did the gates look when they existed? What did the city itself look like back when it was thriving? How many people lived there? Did the king live there? What did his palace look like? I wanted to know more about the actual ruins I would be seeing when I went inside the park. I didn’t care so much about the overall history of the Sukhothai Kingdom. I was more interested in learning about the things I was going to see when I went into the park itself.
I would have loved to see large-scale models of the most famous ruins inside the park. Ideally, there would be exact replicas of how they look today alongside replicas of how they would have looked in their prime in their original condition with all the roofs and structures and artwork in place. And how did they look before they were cleaned up and restored for the park itself to open as a tourist attraction? Surely, they were covered in jungle.
I also would have enjoyed a detailed and informative display about the pottery that Sukhothai was famous for and how the kilns worked. I would have enjoyed some kind of guide to visiting the park. Which are the most important sites? Which predates which? For that matter, how were they built? How was the laterite removed from the ground and then carved and then carried into position? I could go on and on with my questions. And the museum didn’t really answer any of them. I enjoyed my visit to the museum, and there was an exhibit here and there from which I gleaned some interesting information, but I could see the potential for so much more.
And on top of that, I felt a bit oppressed during my visit. There were so many signs telling me all the things I wasn’t supposed to do. And other than take video, I would never want to do any of those things anyway, so I didn’t need the signs. I don’t need to be told a dozen times not to touch the exhibits. It would never occur to me to touch them anyway. I also don’t need to be told not to sit on them. Why would I ever do that? And I’m not going to try to smoke. And the woman at the main counter was quite abrupt in her dealings with me. She was simply there to sell tickets and take my money. Beyond that, she did not convey any sense of warmth or welcome. And in the main exhibit hall, a museum warden followed me everywhere I went. This man walked everywhere I walked, and he stood twenty feet away with his hands folded while watching me intently. I assume he was there to monitor my behavior and jump in if I threatened to do anything against the museum rules. It was an uncomfortable feeling to be watched so closely the entire time.
This man didn’t follow me to the second floor, but there was another museum warden up there. At least this woman didn’t physically follow me around the whole floor, but she stood up when I came up, and then she followed me with her eyes. I found myself looking for pillars and barriers where I could stand for a minute or two blocked from her view. The funniest moment came when I found myself standing in front of some kind of audiovisual display. There were two buttons I could press to start the video. One of the buttons was labelled “English”, and I pushed that one. The video started to play, and the narrator’s voice started booming loudly across the whole second floor, but in Thai.
When I left the museum, I walked across the street to the ticket booth for the historical park. I wanted to get some information for the next day. I found out about the three sections of the park requiring separate tickets. The ticket for the main historical park cost 100 baht for foreigners. I don’t know how much it was for Thai citizens. But I wasn’t able to find out how much it cost to visit Wat Si Chum and Wat Phra Pai Luang. I was glad to be able to pick up a good map to the park and a detailed brochure. I took those away with me so that I could examine them before visiting the park.
And that, other than a swim in the pool (which I enjoyed very much) made up the bulk of my day. Today, after breakfast, I will go to the main historical park. At first, I thought I could easily walk from my guest house to the park, but it’s actually a bit far to do that comfortably. I expect that I will walk everywhere in the park, so I want to conserve my walking energy for that. I will ride my scooter to the entrance, park it at the museum parking lot for scooters and then get my ticket. My idea right now is to visit the main historical park and then visit Wat Si Chum. If I do that today, then I would be free to visit the second historical park located at Si Satchanalai tomorrow. That park is located around sixty kilometers north of here, and going there will likely be a full day affair for me. Anyway, time for breakfast.