So as we planned our itinerary in Thailand we had to figure out a way to get in our ruins fix. Time was tight. Our side-trips to Laos and Cambodia cut into the 5 or 6 weeks we had originally planned on spending here, and we knew we wanted to see Chaing Mai in the north and then relax on some islands in the south. We checked into our options and discovered that Bangkok Airways, a regional airlines with an improving safety record, had a flight to Chiang Mai that stopped in Sukhothai. For a small additional fee we could get off in Sukhothai, stay a day, and then reboard the next day. This was perfect.

Sukhothai served as Thailand's first capital. From the 12th to 14th centuries it was a thriving political and cultural center, and the vast ruins from that era cover a 45 square kilometer area just west of the current town, new Sukhothai. The ruins include temples, old city walls, moats, etc. The works. We took the short hop of a flight up from Bangkok in the morning, leaving the afternoon free to tour the ruins.

Mike and I rented motorbikes (I've settled on "motorbikes" as a fair compromise between "scooter" and "motorcycle") to shuttle us out to the site. I picked up a Honda Dream, familiar to me from my cruisin' on Cat Ba island in Ha Long Bay, and it started right up so I pulled out of the driveway and turned right onto the street. I was startled to find myself staring straight into an oncoming truck in my lane! Unlike Vietnam, drivers in Thailand generally stick to the correct lane, so I was surprised -- not mention a little angry -- that this guy was such an idiot that he would drive straight at me. I looked around and saw several other cars and motorbikes doing the same. Ridiculous!

It was probably the blare of the horn that did it. I suddenly realized, horrified and embarassed, that in Thailand they drive British style, in the left lane. Whoops. I didn't make that mistake again, and now every time I make a turn I have a habit of repeating to myself in a sort of autistic twitch "left lane left lane left lane."

We drove for a while on a dirt path, following an old canal. Along the way we passed traditional Thai houses. All were set high on stilts and usually had a smiling, waving child out front and a dog sleeping in the dusty driveway. After 20 minutes, now back on the main road, we saw our first ruins. It was a crumbling brick structure. Just a few outlines of walls and some taller unidentifiable structures. The weird thing was that the site was unmarked and it was surrounded on all sides by modern development. There was a restaurant on one side, a hotel on the other. I was laid up next to the highway like a McDonald's would be in America, and no one paid it much attention.

We pushed on, heading west, and passed a few more ruins much like the first. Then we saw ahead of us a long ridge in the ground, maybe 15 feet high. Our road passed through a cut in the ridge, and as we drove through we could see in the cross section that it was in fact an old stone wall now overgrown with turf. The walls of old Sukhothai.

Once we entered the old city we were in the national historic park and the modern buildings dwindled away. At first glance it looked like a Parisian city park. The grass was cut short and bordered by shorn hedges, lakes and ponds dotted the landscape, and grand old trees were spaced nicely about. But dropped into this familiar landscape clusters of towering ruins stretched in every direction. It wasn't solid ruins, but here and there amongst the grass fields were the remains of the old temples and palaces.

We drove to the first cluster of ruins and hopped off our motorbikes. Paths led right into and through the old temples. Up close we saw carved into the brick worn remnants of elephants and Buddhas. Pillars rose up out of the grass. One could easily imagine how impressive the buildings must have been when they were young. Here and there, huge Buddha statues 40 feet tall stood looking out over the fields.

The next several hours were a delight. We drove from site to site, stopping frequently to walk through the remains. Although we were visiting in peak tourist season we were almost alone. I had ticket number 28 for the day, not a high density of people considering the awesome scale of the place and especially compared to the 50,000 plus packed into the Forbidden City in Beijing the day we visited.

After a while we drove out through the old city wall on the opposite side. Here we began climbing into the hills that rise out of the flat plain. We passed a half-dozen or so more ruins, drove through a crowd of young high-fiving Boy Scouts, and then parked our bikes for a short hike up to a temple. On top of the hill we sat down at the feet of a large Buddha statue, the only remains of the temple. We looked east and saw the whole of Old Sukhothai laid out at our feet. It was an impressive site. Sukhothai isn't overgrown with jungle, but it has a peaceful trim look. As we strolled through we didn't feel that same sense of discovery that we felt, for example, in the ruins of Hue, but we did feel a kind of quiet majesty that still pervades the place.

Back in New Sukhothai for the evening, we ate our way through their night market. Al 3 or 4 of the main streets in central Sukhothai were covered with stalls selling clothes, trinkets, crafts, and most importantly, food. First we went to an informal sit-down place for some phad thai, curry, and stir fry. Then came various meats-on-a-stick: park on a stick, chicken on a stick, pork meatballs on a stick, etc. Our meat ratio was getting a little high, so we wrapped up the evening with some waffles and some fat-fried banana pancakes.

The majesty of the Sukhothai ruins is matched only by the majesty of the Sukhothai airport. Hands down, it is the best airport I have ever been to. Period. It is tiny, just a cluster of 2 or 3 small open-sided pavillions. It is beautifully constructed with wood beams and roofs of tile and thatch. The bathroom sink was so artfully designed out of local pottery that Sarah Karna take a picture of her standing in the bathroom. They had fresh fruit set out for the passengers, and the entire length of the runway was lined with bright pink flowers. I was almost sad when our plane came.

A quick 20 minute flight brought us further north to Chiang Mai. Mike and I trustingly followed Sarah and Karna out for an afternoon of "siteseeing," but somehow we ended up at a pottery shop for the next two or three hours. I am battle-hardened shopping veteran from my time in 'Nam, where the 4 days clothes shopping in Hoi An had imbued me with the patience of a junior high school orchestra conductor. I know not to fight it, so I just sit down with a book. But poor Mike was just off the ship from America, untested, and now he was facing the retail equivalant of Utah beach. He kept leaving on long looping walks through town, but each time he returned the girls were still examing vases and comparing soup bowls. I'm not saying there's a connection here, but Mike took ill that evening and didn't recover for several days.

The next morning the three healthy members of our expedition rose early for what turned out to be one of the neatest things we've done on this trip -- a Thai cooking class. Our class started at the market, where our instructor walked from stall to stall and showed us how to pick out the best ingredients. We learned about everything from coconut milk (it comes from pressing the coconut flesh, not from that watery stuff that sloshes around in the core) to peppers (the little greens ones are hotter than the big red ones) to strange vegetables (like the things I thought were grapes that are actually a kind of eggplant). After buying our ingredients for the day we piled into the back of a pickup truck for the drive to our master chef's house, where the hands-on portion of our class would take place.

Our chef's cooking school was clearly doing well, because his house was a great big estate in a gated community full of great big estates, the kind of place that in America has a name like "Briar Glen" or "Canterbury Woods." Separate from the main house was a pretty thatch-roofed pavillion with 10 or 12 individual cooking stations. As I stepped up to my station and turned on the gas burner I got a little misty eyed for the Genesis 1000, my lonely Weber grill back home.

Class was great. We chopped and fried and simmered. The friendly instructers circled about, keeping an eye on us, yelling instructions like a basketball coach. "Lemongrass! Now!" By 1:00 we had made four dishes: yellow chicken curry, stir-fried chicken and cashew nuts, phad thai, and fish steamed in banana leaves. We sat down for lunch. The stars may never align this way again, and the supervision definitely helped, but I must say I was quite the gustatory magician. My food was excellent. Delicious. I politely complimented my fellow students when I tasted their creations, but mine was obviously superior. We all stuffed ourselves silly. Any one of those dishes would have filled up your average diner, but we ate four.

A lesser man would have stopped there, but we dragged ourselves burping and belching back to our cooking stations for the afternoon session. Thankfully it was smaller, just two dishes. Bananas in coconut cream and spicy shrimp salad. We somehow forced these down; they were also delicous but by this time I needed a glottal shoe-horn to fit any more food into my stomach.