Temples, Noodles, and Red Earth in Sukhothai and Si Satchanalai

I went to Thailand in March because I needed to get some work done.

Bangkok is a pretty ideal place if you're looking for somewhere easy to hunker down for a while to grind away on projects, proposals, and emails. There's excellent public transportation, great and affordable food, fun things to do when you need a break, and a profusion of perfectly nice hotels and places to stay with high-speed Internet. I spent my days in BKK staring at my computer, working out, and eating excellent and affordable food at local Thai food courts and noodle shops. (Don't miss the shrimp-head infused tom yum at Pe Aor Tom Yum Kung, which I went back twice for).

The only down-side was that the condo-filled neighborhood I was in, Asok, happens to butt up against some of the cities premier areas for Sweaty Old Western Man Sex Tourism, And I just don't need to see a 72 year old Australian in a mesh shirt at 7:30 AM. The good news is that, contrary to popular belief, there are a lot of places in Bangkok and in Thailand free of the scourge of nipple-pierced grandfathers from Liverpool. So, that's on me: I've been away from Southeast Asia since 2014, and I forgot about the importance of booking a Bangkok hotel in a neighborhood with minimal exposure to that particular demographic of foreigner. I will not make this mistake again.

Bangkok has some excellent cultural tourist attractions - palaces, temples, parks, all the stuff that is allegedly being portrayed on that White Lotus show everyone tells me that I should watch and that I've never been able to make it through an episode of. But I've been to the city a number of times over the years, and I've already seen most of them. I did drag myself away from the Cycle of Emails one evening on an excellent food tour of Bangkok's Chinatown via A Chef's Tour, which exposed me to a lot of places I wouldn't have found just by poking around on Google Maps a lot, and also introduced me to the curious joys of soy-sauce flavored ice cream.

I also checked in on the Bangkok National Museum, which has seen some impressive updates since I was last there in 2014. I was particularly struck by the beauty of the Hindu statues hailing from the ancient Thai city of Sukhothai, widely considered to be the root of modern Thai culture. And the timing was excellent, because I had booked myself in to spend a few days exploring Sukhothai before I departed for Singapore and Indonesia.

As it turned out, the four days I spent in Sukhothai were some of the nicest I've ever spent in Thailand.

Sukhothai is a place of pivotal historical and cultural importance for Thailand. First evolving from a small-time trading center into a proper city state around 1127, it was established as the Sukhothai Kingdom in 1238, ushering in a cultural golden age that many consider to pivotal to the development of what Thai culture and art look like today. Perhaps Sukhothai's most important artifact is the Ram Khamhaeng Inscription, a 1292 inscription attributed to King Ram Khamhaeng, written in a very early form of Thai script.

The text itself describes the prosperity of the kingdom, the fairness and generosity of the ruler (who described his relationship with the people in terms rather similar to those of a father and son) and even specifically names a few war elephants. (There is some controversy over if the inscription is fake or not, and it is far, far above my pay grade to weigh in on that).

As Thailand's rulers worked to modernize the country and develop a general sense of national feeling in the 19th and 20th centuries, they focused on Sukhothai as Thailand's first true national capital. The main takeaway here: Sukhothai is, symbolically, a very important place.

Despite its importance, Sukhothai is not all that well documented in English language literature, at least as far as I could tell. Whenever I visit an archeological site, I like to make sure I've read through a few guidebooks to help me contextualize the stuff I'm going to be looking at. For Sukhothai, this was rough going. Even repeated searches with Kagi - which is a paid search engine that is much less useless than modern-day Google, and no, they're not paying me to say that - turned up little but endless repetitive articles by engagement-thirsty travel bloggers with the relative cultural depth of cat puke (a category from which I do not exclude myself).

After some scrounging around online, I managed to dig up a PDF of art historian Betty Gosling's 1991 "Sukhothai: Its History, Culture and Art" which proved to be a detailed look at the city's history, the existing structures, and information on what it all meant. I'd suggest this book to others if you can find a copy.

Sukhothai is almost smack-dab in the middle of Thailand, about equidistant from Bangkok and from Chiang Mai, and it's easier to take a cheap flight there than to bother with a bus. As my Bangkok Airlines flight flew low over the runway, the jet startled a herd of water buffalo, which gallumphed away as magnificently as they could muster up. And then, as they drove us to the tiny little terminal on the tiny little train, I spotted the giraffe.

For some reason, there is a zoo attached to the Sukhothai Airport, and you can watch the giraffes and zebras graze while you're waiting for your baggage, which doesn't take very long as there's usually only one flight at a time. For some other unknown reason, there is a dinosaur museum at the airport with a large outside collection of remarkably high-quality dinosaur statues - I regret that I didn't get a chance to go in.

On the taxi ride in, I stared out at the bone-dry and dusty Central Thai scenery, which reminded me just a little bit of a bizarro-world version of the U.S. South, down to the red earth and the profusion of dust-spattered pickup trucks. (Thailand is one of the biggest pickup truck markets in the world). The seasonal dryness and the savanna-like foliage also reminded me a little bit of the plains of India, which isn't, I suppose, that far away.

I checked in around 9:00 AM at the Sawasadee Sukhothai Resort, a delightful and startlingly affordable little place featuring a dozen or so bungalows spread out around a garden and a saltwater swimming pool. From there, I hopped on a hotel-provided bicycle and started pedaling towards the Sukhothai Historical Park, hoping to beat the oppressive mid-day Thai heat.

Sukhothai is a small and highly pleasant modern town connected to the fairly large, ancient expanse of the Sukhothai Historical Park. While tourism is the main industry here, Sukhothai isn't all that close to any of Thailand's other main tourist attractions, and has none of the night-life and bar scene that attracts many people to the kingdom's other main attraction. You only show up in Sukhothai if you're genuinely interested in Thai history, and that's a smaller tourist demographic than people who really want to drink Mekong whiskey out of a bucket while wearing a t-shirt with a picture of a dick on it.

Wand hen I was there in March of 2025, there only seemed to be a few dozen other tourists in town, although a few, easily avoidable group tour buses did roll by during the day. If you find yourself stressed out by the urban frustrations of Bangkok, Sukhothai may just be the perfect friendly and slow-paced antidote, with plenty of low-key things to see, friendly locals, and traffic that mostly consists of local chickens.

The Sukhothai Historical Park consists of approximately three sections. There's a fenced-in central section, closest to town (which is to the right of Route 12 on the map above) which features most of the more iconic temples and monuments that you'd see in tourist brochures, including the imposing Wat Mahathat (which translates as "temple of the great relic", because, well, King Si Inthrathit put a great Buddhist relic from Sri Lanka in it).

In addition to the central, fenced-in area of Sukhothai, there are also clusters of temples to the west and to the north of the main center, as well as a smaller cluster to the south. These regions also theoretically charge admission, but the ticket booths were only sporadically attended when I was there. Regardless, the admission fee of 100 ฿ ($2.93 at the time of writing) isn't exactly extravagant.

Mostly, tourists get around Sukhothai on bicycles. There are supposedly shops in town that will rent motorbikes to tourists, but I do not suggest this unless you actually are experienced at riding motorbikes: whenever I'm in Thailand, I notice a whole lot of tourists nursing various grievous motorbike injuries. Just rent a bicycle.

If you're in Sukhothai in March, which is not an ideal time of year to be there due to the heat, be cognizant of the weather so you don't die. The Historical Park opens at 6:30 AM, and I tried to be at the gates and exploring each day by 7:00 AM, before things really started to get nasty and humid - highs hit over 100 a few days I was there. You can always come back for a second round in the afternoon. The parks stay open until 7:30 PM, and you're allowed to be in there during sunset.

During my first day, I stopped off at the 7-11 in the center of town to stock up on water and Coke Zero (hydration is essential), paused at the local market next to the 7-11 to buy a big bag of freshly-fried pork skin from a nice lady (also essential), and cruised into the main historical park.

I stopped first at the aforementioned Wat Mahathat, a mandala-shaped temple with a stupia in the shape of a lotus bud that was intended to hold Buddhist relics, flanked by two 30-foot-tall standing statues of the Buddha. Constructed between 1292 and 1347, the temple was renovated a number of times under successive Sukhothai rulers: it's particularly impressive at night, and the park guards appear to be willing to wave you through on your bike for free if you swing by to watch the sun go down.

I proceeded southwest of Wat Mahathat to visit the attractively symmetrical Wat Si Sawai, which dates back to the late 12th or early 13th century and was, maybe, originally intended as a Hindu temple, with the lower part of the prangs, or towers, built in a Khmer style and then later expanded by Thai artisans. As others have stated, they really do look a lot like majestic heads of grilled corn.

After Wat Si Sawai, I rode my bike around the park's perimeter, pausing for a while at the pretty water-surrounded Wat Traphang Ngoen Phra Ubosot (Ordination Hall) to watch a hoopoe - a bird equipped with a mohawk right out of a pop-punk band in 2003 - do some sort of esoteric sun-bathing ritual. This made me feel a lot like Aubrey Maturin, and I like feeling like Aubrey Maturin when I'm traveling.

As the heat began to hit hard and I began to feel myself starting to gently braise like a ham hock in my own sweat, I headed to the blissfully air-conditioned Ramkhamhaeng National Museum, which is right outside the park's main entrance. The museum was larger than I thought it would be, and is a very worthy overview of Sukhothai's history and artistic styles, complete with one of those sweet-ass 3D-diorama regional maps with little buttons that light up when you press them. I'd highly suggest it to give yourself a general orientation.

As I existed the museum, I paused to watch a colorful procession of local people go round and round the still-in-use temple of Wat Traphang Thong Lang, which sits in the middle of a moat that is fringed by a night market in the evening. I had no idea what was going on, but it looked like people were giving out free snacks and drinks, other people had laid out picnic blankets and coolers, and monks were throwing something like favors or candy into the crowd which everyone scrambled to get in a good-natured way. Mostly, it reminded me of a small-scale Buddhist variant on Mardi Gras. I've been looking online and have been unable to figure out what this celebration was - but if you know, dear reader, please drop me a line.

On my second day in Sukhothai, I focused on riding around the northern monuments.

The Khmer Empire once ruled the part of Thailand that is Sukhothai todaay, and there are remnants of the Khmer presence in both Sukhothai and in its sister city of Si Satchanalai, which I'll get to in a minute. In Sukhothai proper, the largest remaining remnant is the surviving north tower of Wat Phra Phai Luang: two other towers eventually collapsed with the passage of time. While most of the Cambodian Khmer monuments were made with sandstone, it's a rarity in this part of Thailand.

That means that the Wat Phra Phai Luang towers (like most other structures at Sukhothai) were made with more crumbly locally available stone and faced with stucco, a fact which probably helps explain why Sukhothai's monuments appear to be in more weathered condition, at least to my untrained eye, than the monuments at Angkor - even though they were built more recently. The towers here face towards the remains of a wihan, or congregation hall that was once used by Buddhist worshipers, not dissimilar to structures that exist today. It's all surrounded by a lovely moat that's popular with both birds and enormous monitor lizards.

The other most impressive monument in the northern sector, and perhaps the weirdest structure in Sukhothai, is Wat Si Chum. It's a curious square structure (or mandapa) containing an enormous stucco statue of the Buddha in the attitude of subduing Mara (IE, fighting back demons intent on preventing him from reaching entitlement, as demons are wont to do).

As you approach the monument, the Buddha's serene face becomes ever more clearly outlined in the peak-shape of the door, presenting a rather arresting visual experience - especially if you get there early in the morning and have the place to yourself, other than some mostly friendly local dogs and constantly-bickering mynah birds. Wat Si Chum also has a genuine mysterious secret passageway.

The little holes in the building to the left of the main entry way provide air for a passageway that runs inside the walls and all the way up to the roof. Inside the passageway, archeologists found over 50 15th century slate engravings of the life of the Buddha, known as jatakas.

Some experts, like Betty Gosling, believe that these jatakas were originally intended to be placed at the base of the Wat Mahathat tower in Old Sukhothai's center, but were moved here at a later date by the powerful and renovation-happy Buddhist monk Si Satha: others, like the authors of this recent paper, believe the jatakas had been meant to go inside the likely symbolically-unearthly corridor inside the mandapa to begin with. While visitors aren't allowed inside the real corridor, there's an interesting reconstruction of what it looks like in there at the aforementioned Ramkhamhaeng National Museum.

I eventually stopped off at the ruins of one of the kilns that once, long ago, was used to produce Sukhothai's famous pottery, which was exported all over Asia. It was obvious that these were indeed kilns because there were shards of Sukhothai pottery, exactly like those I saw in the museum, on the ground everywhere I looked. It was fascinating to walk around and see these very real reminders of what life used to be like back in the 1300s and 1400s, lying unattended on the ground.

The day after that, I rode my bike out to the Western cluster of monuments in a forested area once referred to as Aranyika, which are very slightly further out and were extremely quiet on the day I arrived. Mostly, I saw people preparing their rice fields, monks in pickup trucks, and a remarkable variety of interesting, colorful forest birds. I admit that at this point, the temple ruins were starting to blend together a bit in my mind, although I did stop to dutifully read the signs at each stop-off point. I saw a mostly-vanished temple with a still somewhat maintained statue of the Buddha next to the local Boy Scout camp, and a series of temples at the top of hills that I lacked the fortitude to climb in the heat.

The heat was set to hit over 100 degrees Fahrenheit that day, and I called it quits before 10:00 AM, stopping at a convenience store on the way back to town to chug two bottles of Coke Zero at a picnic table while watching an extremely slowly-moving pickup truck shouting political slogans for a local election candidate. Refreshed, I rode a few minutes further to stop for an early lunch at Khun Det Kitchen, where I ate some excellent pad thai in a distinctively Thai-whimsical palm hut. On my way back to town, I stopped at Wat Sorasak, a pleasantly compact chedi flanked by well-preserved and whimsically-sized elephants.

On my last day in the Sukhothai area, I asked my hotel to organize a taxi to take me out to Si Satchanalai Historical Park, about an hour north of the town of Sukhothai itself. As it turned out, I found these ruins even more impressive than those in Sukhothai. I also discovered that my driver, an older Thai woman, was really into listening to outlaw country.

Before stopping at the main Si Satchanalai historical park, my driver took me to the hillside temples of Wat Chedi Ean and Wat Khao Yai Lang. They're both situated on top of a hill, with one a little lower down than the other, and they were still and just a little spooky in the early-morning twilight. At Wat Khao Yai Lang, I came across the degraded form of a Buddha statue in which the stucco had rotted away to reveal a deeply unsettling faceless, mannequin-like shape.

Next, it was on to the main attraction at Si Satchanalai, where we were the only people in the good-sized parking lot at 8:30 AM. Unlike at Sukhothai, the main site is compact enough to be walked around, and I chose to forego the bike and go in on foot.

Founded in 1250, Si Satchanalai functioned as a sort of sister city to Sukhothai, governed by the son of Sukhothai's king and equipped with its own set of temples, palaces, and fortifications. While Sukhothai started to decline after around 1300, Si Satchanalai stayed economically and industrially relevant for considerably longer, and was home to its own important center of porcelain production for export.

And now, in March 2025, I had the place almost entirely to myself.

I stopped first at Wat Nang Phaya, a lovely temple complex and stupa from the 15th or 16th century that preserves some rare original examples of Sukhothai stuccowork designs on one of its remaining walls. Thes designs have been used as inspiration by local jewelers and artists, which is a nice touch.

Next, I walked to the elegant tower of Wat Chedi Chet Thaew, which was built sometime after 1347 by King Li Thai, and which may have once held the ashes of the Sukhothai royal family. There are over 30 snack-sized small chedi towers surrounding the central lotus-bud shaped tower. At its base, I noticed yet another eerily degraded Buddha statue: the unfortunate failure state of 1300s technology in the realm of making long-lasting religious statues.

Next were the remains of Wat Chang Lom, a massive Ceylon-type chedi from the late 14th century which sites on a three-tiered base with multiple rows of crumbling but still visible elephants supporting its platform - over 30 in all, another stylistic nod to the Buddhist architecture of Sri Lanka, which had a great influence on the culture and art of Sukhothai. The second tier of the monument contains 20 niches each containing a statue of the Buddha, some with remaining traces of visible paint. At least from my point of view, this was the most impressive monument I saw in the entire Sukhothai region, rising impressively out of a forest filled with tropical bird song.

In addition to these two large remaining structures, there are other highly atmospheric, if less well-preserved, temples crumbling in the dry-leaf litter of Si Satchanalai in March. Like in Sukhothai, I found dozen of remnants of ancient porcelain lying on the ground amidst the ruins, a remarkably tangible reminder of the past.

The ruins are beautiful, but Si Satchanalai is also a birder's paradise. I saw Asian Green Bee-Eaters, a White-throated Kingfisher, a bright-yellow Black-naped Oriole, a pair of Hoopoes, entertainingly easily surprised and gangly Red-Wattled Lapwings, and a number of other species as I wandered around the ruins. Bring your binoculars, or a long lens: I wish I'd thought of bringing either.

For the last stop of the day, my driver took me to the marveously odd and lengthily-named Wat Phra Si Rattana Mahathat Chaliang, which is situated on a bend in the Yom River a few minutes away from the core of the Si Satchanalai historical park. Unlike most of the other temples in the Sukhothai area, this one is still actively in use, with more modern religious structures backing up to ruins that likely date as far as the reign of the Khmer King Jayavarman VII, although no one seems to be sure about the dating. What we see today dates back to the 1400s and the Ayutthaya era, when the old more Khmer-looking monument was renovated and built over by King Borom Trai Lokkanat.

I climbed up the mildly terrifying stairs to the top and peered inside the inner chamber of the prang, which smelled of both great age and of pigeon. This small space is thought to contain Buddhist relics, and people still make offerings to them today - seeing them is an interesting reminder of what the other temples at Sukhothai must have been like when they were in more active use.

Beyond the prang, Wat Phra Si Rattana Mahathat Chaliang features two famous Sukhothai-style Buddha statues (one walking) with commanding noses. My favorite feature was the curious mini-prang stuck on top of a gate in the wall that surrounds the structure, which you can see above: while it was most likely built by the people of Sukhothai and not by the Khmer, it's extremely obviously riffing off the psychedelic jumble of noble visages that is the Bayon temple in Angkor Wat, a place I've visited many times and have great affection for. It's also, perhaps, a good metaphor for Sukhothai itself: a place initially founded by the Khmer that the Tai people eventually made, with the passage of time and considerable creative vision, very much their own.

What to Eat in Sukhothai

Mostly, you should eat Sukhothai noodles in Sukhothai.

Sukhothai is home to one of Thailand's many fine regional noodle dishes, and this is one of my favorites: rice noodles in a sweet and spicy soup with both roasted and ground pork, diced long beans, fried shallots, greens, peanuts, salted turnip, and crispy pork cracklings on top. I had a bowl of these for lunch almost every day I was in town. All of the bowls were good, but my favorite was served by the very nice lady at the Sukhothai Noodle Shop.

Sukhothai is also home to multiple lovely night markets.

The main night market, which appears on the streets around Wat Traphang Thong around nightfall, features a surprisingly huge number of excellent food and snack stalls, considering the size of the town. There are straw mats and small tables laid out around the edge of the temple's moat, and you can stake one of these out and bring your food back to eat it there. Don't miss the stall selling passion fruit smoothies.

The Tha Nam Rap Sadet Market is situated in a especially atmospheric location within old Sukhothai itself and runs on weekends and on holidays, offering a smaller selection of food, snacks, and drinks. I very much enjoyed snacking on some of the sweet and spicy dried pork sold there.

Finally, on Saturday nights in Sukhothai, there's a brief and extremely local-oriented night market that sets up on Route 1272 across from the Phum Phor Coffee Restaurant. I bought a sick-ass t-shirt with a dragon on it there, as well as some tasty fermented sausages. Highly suggested.

For a nice meal complete with air conditioning and ambience, I suggest the aforementioned Phum Phor Coffee Restaurant on Route 1272. Try the shrimp paste fried rice. The Chorphaka Sukhothai restaurant, which is close to the Sawasdee Sukhothai Resort, also has pretty good curry dishes, as well as an air conditioned room.