Finally we found a webpage with a good weather forecast for the south so we decided to take the bus from Chiang Mai down to the ancient temple town Sukothai. A rough six hour drive later, after a broken clutch that got fixed by the driver himself we arrived in the vast town of New Sukothai.
Luckily two dutch girls were on the same bus and they seemed to be better informed about guest houses so we ended up staying at J&J’s Guest House, a nice looking place, clean, with a pool and good food – but quite expensive (350 Baht for a fan room with toilet). And as we discovered later the ambience of the place is quite sterile, maybe because you always feel being watched by the owners. But yet it seems to be the best choice to stay.
The new part of the town doesn’t offer many things to do – we couldn’t spot a single restaurant and only one weird looking bar called Chopper. At least they have cheap internet and we hired a scooter for the next day to get to the ancient part of the town i.e. the ruins of loads of Buddha staues and halls. And the weather was really nice, hot and sunny, perfect for this sort of sight seeing.
After two hours we headed off to a nearby waterfall which turned out to be pretty dry so we returned to Sukothai to get the mirror of the scooter fixed (which I had stupidly broken earlier) and hung out at the guest house with the dutch girls from next door.
This morning we took an early leave at 7.30 and got a tuk-tuk to the airport, a nice ride through rural landscapes in the morning sun. With Bangkok Airlines (perfect service!) it is an 50 minutes flight to Bangkok where I’m currently typing this while waiting for the transfer flight to Krabi. Fingers crossed the weather is good down there!