Beach Please

So after 4 wonderful days in Chiang Mai, I grabbed a bus down to Sukhothai. Spent a day exploring the ancient and impressive ruins scattered in and around the city. Sukhothai was the capital of Thailand before you were born and was destroyed by the Burmese. There's some prett cool temples that still survive and a truly massive Buddha statue that was worth seeing. All told, it was like a less impressive and less touristy (there's that word again) version of Angkor Wat.

Then it was on to Kanchanaburi where I visited the famous (and pretty) 7 Steps Waterfalls. You can go swimming in the pools under the falls and little fish will nibble at your feet, eating all your dead skin off. It feels kinda weird at first, but it's cool once you get used to 20 little mouths softly chewing on you. I also visited the historic Bridge over the River Kwai and nearby Hellfire Pass, vestiges of the 2nd World War. During that time, POWs were forced by the Japanese to build a railway from Thailand to Burma. Pretty brutal work, since almost everything was built by hand and the Japanese forced people to work 18 hour days with little food to keep them going. Something like 100,000 people (12,000 POWs) died building the railway, which now lies mostly abandoned (I did, however, get to ride on a short section that's still in operation).

To Bangkok, which was surprisingly cool and not nearly as dirty and decrepit as I'd feared. Neat place, but there's not a whole lot to do once you've seen the majestic Royal Palace and the nearby 15m tall, 50m long reclining Buddha statue. So after only one day, I grabbed a flight to beautiful Phuket. Phuket Town itself I like quite a bit, it's got a lot of old Portuguese buildings, some good restaurants and I got a really cool loft room on the top terrace of a guest house that I'm totally in love with. The nearby beaches, though nice, are a little too crowded for my tastes, so I'm going to check out some less resortish places and see what lost paradises I can uncover.

Then it's back home, arriving in GP on the 28th (not the 21st, not sure who started that rumour). I'll get some pictures up sometime, but mostly I'll just be relaxing on the beach. See you all (or some of you) next week, take care!