We took an overnight bus from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, which was sort of out of our realm of experience (it involved a few straightfaced announcements by the attendant that we mistook for “this bus is going back to Bangkok and you’re all out of luck” as it was shortly accompanied by a giant u-turn, but it turned out we were just stopping at a rest stop; seats that reclined all the way back to the point that your legs were pinned and you couldn’t actually move them; and a woman behind us who took the opportunity to spend the entire night on the phone) but overall was pretty comfortable, and another passenger even gave up his window seat to let us sit together. When we arrived in the city, we managed to find ourselves a tuk-tuk driver who dropped us off on a random corner in the city when we declined to stay at the guesthouse they drove us to, and the first guesthouse we stayed in had a resident drunk, possibly mentally unstable, family member who sang loudly and unintelligibly directly into our screen window while watering the garden from 2am to 9am–we were fairly certain we were going to get watered as well in the middle of the night.

For the rest of Chiang Mai, we stayed on the second floor of a beautiful teak guesthouse with tall ceilings, a huge mattress on the floor (it was actually three small mattresses lined up in a row), and a private bathroom. We spent most of our time inside the walls of the old city, visiting sparkling wats covered floor to ceiling in gold leaf, and green, blue and yellow bits of mirrors, occupied by young monks in yellow-golden robes chanting surrounded by beautiful murals depicting Buddhist and Hindi mythology.

We had some wonderful food in Chiang Mai, like the rest of Thailand. Tom Kha Gai, a coconut soup with kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass, galangal (related to ginger but quite different), chicken and chiles. Khao Soi, a curry and egg noodle soup served with a chicken thigh, with pickled veggies and fresh dry green beans on the side. Tom Yum, a clear tomato-y lemongrass and kaffir lime soup that was by far the spiciest thing I ate in Thailand. Beef, pineapple and pepper kebabs from street food vendors, fresh ripe mango with sticky rice and thick coconut milk, fried wontons filled not with cream cheese, but a hardboiled quail egg (surprise!), lemon and strawberry “ancient” ice cream. Of course, we had to have more spicy basil stir fry, green curry with thai eggplant, and pad thai, and a few mystery snack foods including some crackers we’ve come to refer to as “angry exploding hotdog snacks” because of the picture on the bag.

One morning as we were lying in bed, we heard megaphone announcements, cheering and honking, and ran out to follow on foot a motorcade of red-shirt protesters snaking out of the old city. We followed them to the provincial democratic party headquarters where they were rallying, megaphoning protest chants in Thai, dancing on pickup truck beds to recorded music, and burning a coffin representing the current Prime Minister Abhisit; the red shirts are more or less in support of the former PM Thaksin who was ousted in 2006, although from what we can tell the protesters were not only pro-Thaksin, but also against the military coup that dissolved Thaksin’s party and awarded the PM position to the opposing party. The protest’s mood was excited and positive, and supporters included young men in bandannas and aviator glasses, songthaew drivers, and groups of smiling grandmothers with red, heart-shaped noisemakers; and the police, while in riot gear and at the ready, were pretty relaxed during the whole affair. It was a really interesting thing to witness, we feel pretty lucky to have been in the right place at the right time.

From Chiang Mai, we left on a train for a town called Phitsanulok near Sukhothai, another former capital of Thailand with beautiful ruins spanning the entire old city. However, the train we took left hours later than it was supposed to, after many delays and mysterious intercom announcements that we didn’t understand and a very extensive train-washing process. We sat across from an elderly couple squatting on the floor of the train, eating balls of sticky rice and salted meat from a banana leaf; food vendors come on the train to sell meat and rice, hardboiled eggs with mini handpacked inflated bags of soy sauce, crunchy, green apple-y jujube fruits with a mixture of salt, sugar and chile for dipping, quartered pineapple on a wooden skewer, or translucent glutinous rice balls filled with peanuts and chiles. Because of the delay leaving, we arrived in Phitsanulok at 2am, tired and sticky and covered in chaff from the still-burning fields that blows steadily in the open train windows, stopped on the side of the road for some glass-noodle soup with blanched mystery meatballs, and after wandering around looking unsuccessfully for a guesthouse while dodging cockroaches the size of small mice (that’s not an exaggeration, by the way) we decided to just walk to the bus station and wait for the first bus to old Sukhothai.

When we got there, we had hot coffee with sweetened condensed milk and rice for breakfast, and rented bikes to explore the ruins (not unlike, apparently, hundreds of other tourists crawling the ruins in droves–going early to avoid the crowd is a failed venture in Thailand). The ruins themselves were really interesting; the fascinating Wat Sri Chum houses a massive, legendary talking Buddha. An early Thai king brought his forces to the statue that spoke to the men, commanding and inspiring them to fight bravely in battle. Later, an echoey secret passage was discovered which led up and behind the statue. We watched the sun set over Sukothai historical park–it was beautiful. Check out our photos from Chiang Mai and Sukhothai at http://picasaweb.google.com/mradyfist/ChiangMaiAndSukhothai.

Ayutthaya, not too far north of Bangkok, is a city built on the ruins of the former capital of Thailand–it was one of the most powerful and prosperous cities in Southeast Asia from the 1300s to the 1700s, and had a population of over a million near the end of its heyday. It was sacked in 1767 by the Burmese, and never recovered; the damage was bad enough that the Thai moved their capital to Bangkok.

We took the train to Ayutthaya from Bangkok, which was a great deal (tickets were 15 Thai Baht apiece, about 50 cents at the current exchange rates), and gave us the opportunity to see Bangkok with a very different perspective than we had had before. The train took us through more industrial areas of the city, past the old Don Meuang airport (the international hub until it was replaced by the shiny, modern Suvarnabhumi Airport) as well as miles of shanty towns built on the side of the railroad tracks, modest homes with families and kids and dogs, built from bamboo sticks, 2x4s, cinderblocks and corrugated metal, and past farms running controlled burns on the fields to prepare for the new crops.

On our first night in the city, we signed up for a ferry tour of a few ruins sites on the outside of the river (Ayutthaya is in the Chao Phraya river valley, and the main part of the city is surrounded on all sides by river, which was nice because it made it hard to get too lost). We went to a few wats (temples) that were kept in good shape, including Wat Phananchoeng, which is home to a what is supposedly Thailand’s largest Buddha image–this was one of the first actual wats we had been in since we got to Thailand, and it was beautiful and impressive. The next day we rented one-speed bikes to meander around the city, which was really pleasant and relaxing, and the weather was great. We spent the whole day visiting different wats throughout the city and exploring these crumbled and burned fascinating ruins. It was a very intense experience to be standing on the site of what must have been a very bloody and violent attack on an ancient superpower, one that effectively ended an entire kingdom.

One of the most interesting things about this city was that the ruins are interspersed throughout the city–we’d be biking past houses in a residential area, and come upon a clearing with the ruins of a wat, followed by a 7 Eleven and food carts. Some were in better shape, and while many were cordoned off into parks others had become a part of the urban landscape in the area, with kids in school uniforms playing around them.

We biked around U-Thong Road, the “frontage road” that ran around the city inside of the river’s boundaries, and got to explore a covered market in an extensive alley system (much larger than it looked from the tiny entrance we found), narrow little aisles filled with toys, clothing and shoes, produce, every cut of meat you could imagine (including a whole pig head), live eels trying to escape their confines, stands with hot coals and frying pans and noodles. We bought a pair of sandals for Daniel, and had the unique experience of trying very hard to communicate with someone who didn’t speak any English at all (you kind of forget about that staying in the more touristed areas), and the only Thai I’ve really figured out for sure is “hello” and “thank you”– the Thai phrasebook I have is nice, but I really haven’t gotten my brain all the way around the tonal language idea. In the rare case that I am able to get out an intelligible sentence a Thai person might understand, any follow-up questions are useless and I feel like a hard-headed American.

We stayed at a guesthouse called Tony’s Place on Naresuan Road Soi 1, a sweet little raised wooden structure painted sea-foam green like plenty of the guesthouses in Bangkok. It had a shower and toilet in the room, as well as an electrical outlet, which we came to miss in KhaoSan, and there was a restaurant on the main deck. We had some good food there–wide rice noodles with seafood, pineapple fried rice, and delicious fresh watermelon and pineapple shakes. Overall, it was great–check out the photos we took from the ruins!