Lesson learned (again)

My hand is feeling fine and the burns blistered and turned to hard skin pretty quickly. Not much pain resting my hand on the bars.

I am now in Sukhothai pronounced Soo-koh-thai, I butcher the crap out of the pronunciations of town names. Stopping and asking locals which direction a town is, I usually get a look like, what's this guys problem. That's the undertone to interacting with the locals for me right now. I am working on honing my skills and being able to sync with them. Another one of my problems is syncing myself with the Thai way of life, for everyone that knows me I am ball of energy and I'm always going like the energizer bunny. Here, it is a different way of life. As I ride down the road people are taking naps and hanging out telling stories. I am learning how

to be a professional wanderer. As my friend Charles

in Cambodia says, you just need to take your time and enjoy everything. The night before last I stayed in a small little town between Lampang and Sukhothai called Wang Chin, it was a very rural little town and I made friends with a local mechanic as I rolled into town, he spoke very little english but he was able to direct me towards the local Ban-Pahk (guesthouse). I showered, went into town and got some food so I could crash for the night.

I woke up at 6am to start riding as early as possible, I wanted to make it

to Sukhothai. It ended up taking me 9 hard hours to get here. I was totally

spent by the time I got here, I barely had enough energy to walk into town to get food. I slept 12 hours and woke up around 11am today. Took me a while to get going but I decided to spend another day here and check out historic Sukhothai. The lesson I learned from this is to not have a definite destination, just a direction to travel in. I need to learn to stop and take a nap when I'm tired or chill and eat a bowl of noodles in the shade when the sun is out.

Today after 2 cups of coffee and breakfast I headed to the historic part of Sukhothai which was about 12km west of the modern part of the city. This place was absolutely breathtaking. It is the ruins of the Sukhothai kingdom from the 13th and 14th centuries. The city was founded in the year 500. You can feel the

power of this ancient holy city while walking around. There were local families from Thailand praying at the giant statue of Buddha. After walking around for a while I sat and just took everything in for a while. I am very happy I stayed another day here.

Tomorrow I am going to leave nice and early, beat the sun and get some km's in before it gets hot. When it gets hot I am going to practice my patience, tolerance and Thai style of living by heading to the first Wat I see and chilling with some monks for the afternoon, maybe even taking a nap!!!

That is all for now, wish me luck as I try and chill out a little.