Sukhothai – Si Satchanali – Wang Chin

Ruth: Upon leaving Sukhothai we cycled by a few more temples before heading North, retracing our tracks from three years ago. At Wat Si Chum, a Thai woman gave me three pieces of gold leaf and showed me how to rub it on to the Bhudda’s hand.

The road north to Si Satchanali is lovely and quiet with rice fields and small villages. I ended up overheated because of our late start, and then way too done in to enjoy the amazing historic park of Si Satchanali. As I wallowed in a bit of self pity about the heat and my various body parts that were hurting, I was briefly ensnared by the travel gremlins spreading their nets of travel fatigue. Gord and I are generally pretty resistant, but there always days when travelling just feels hard. This is not usually captured in our photos or our blog, but the gremlins, like bed bugs, usually make an appearance at least once on a trip.

The caption here should be, “Take the bloody picture so that we can go back to our air conditioned A-frame at the Downhill Resort.”

Fortunately after a muscle relaxant, handlebar adjustment, fresh papaya, and a great sleep, I woke up restored once again. Gord and I have learned from our experiences, however, and a visitation from a gremlin necessitates a rest day. We will be booking a place for two nights in Lampang.

Today’s ride to Wang Chin was beautiful, with the flat rice fields giving way to hilly country rich with papaya and citrus orchards. Gord has just reported to me that papaya trees can be male, female or hermaphrodic and that most commercially grown ones are hermaphrodic. We have been consuming lots of papaya, mandarin oranges, and small yellow bananas. Mandarins are rather pricey even here, but papaya are almost free. Today we bought three at a roadside stand for a total of 80 cents. I think we can safely eliminate scurvy from a list of potential travel ailments.