We set off early from Ayuthaya to our next stop Sukothai, annoyingly the main bus station was a few kms out of town so we had to get a tuk tuk down a busy dual carriageway - we were just looking at the traffic behind us when a dog ran into the road and got hit by a car in the lane next to us - it was so upsetting and theres no way it could have survived :-(

We got to the bus station and found out there wasn't another bus for 2 and a half hours so we had to just wait and feel sad about the dog. When the bus did turn up we had a pretty uneventful journey of a few hours to Sukothai and arrived in late afternoon - we booked a nice little guesthouse called Ban Thai which was quite cheap with a shared bathroom.

The main attraction of Sukothai are the ancient ruins of a thai kingdom that emerged after the khmer empire in the late 13th century. We thought it would be best to hire a moped to go off and explore, we chose to go to the central zone which was about 12kms away from where we were staying. We had to pay to get in the central zone and were given a map - the pictures on the map looked as if the ruins were huge, then we realised we were standing in front of one of the places the map made look huge - and it was tiny!!! In fact we drove round the whole area in about 15 mins, the ruins were impressive but as we have seen Angkor Wat and the temples in Bagan it was just more ruins! So as we had the moped we decided to just go off and explore the local area, we went down some mud roads by little farming shacks, found a big lake and nearly got charged more money for going into another ruin zone. The area was very lovely but I think we could have saved money by not hiring a moped and just going on the bus to the main ruins. We did try out the local noodle soup which is sweeter with peanuts and green beans and pork, it tasted of vinegar!!

Next stop Chiang Mai..............................