Sukhothai

Sukothai is the ancient capital of Thailand from 1238 to 1438. as it wasnt too far off the track from our journey from Chiang mai we decided to break up the long journey and visit the temples and take it easy for a day or two before heading to Bangkok.

Just to give you sense of scale, thats me in the white shirt.

What we saw is in the pictures really, the restored remains of many temples and buddha statues. As you can see most of the stone work has been removed and it was the brick inner structures that remained.

Some of the temples were depicting Hindu dieties and gods a bit like the Khymer temples of Angkor, which would mean that hinduism was prevalent in Thailand. these hindu temples were later adapted to be used as Bhuddist places of worship. this was part of the khymer empire which was taken over by the thais. We have found that while visiting ancient temples that they are still used for everyday worship by locals as well as tourist spots for people like us.

Sukhothai was also the birth place of the writing system which is still used today in thailand. the writing was based on South Indian styles of characters.

I forgot to mention that we visited the whole site which covers some area on bicycles which we hired for the day, this i thought would be really tiring in the heat of the day, but was a really nice way to see the historical park. By the way preet had a pink!! haha! no pictures as our camera died.