Phitsanulok- land of spandex and Christmas lights

(Miller)

We arrived in this town around dusk after our sejour in Chiang Mai. The train all day was lovely, as we knew no matter how long it took, we were going to end up in a bed. Enough consolation to take the local class train, appropriately dubbed “ordinary”.

We stayed at the London Hotel…though just bits and pieces of English were spoken. Our digs were a fabulously tight shoebox that had mosquito netting on the windows and a working fan so we dropped our bags and headed out to see the town.

That’s when we saw it; or heard it first rather. Up on a community stage with literally at least 200 people in front of him; was a man in spandex shorts and a pink shirt (color of the day in Thailand) leading aerobics routines to blaring techno. “Holy Richard Simmons in Thailand girl!” I said to Annie. We contemplated jumping in but just couldn’t manage watching and two-stepping WHILE wind milling our arms. Thailand has a huge national fitness movement as was demonstrated by the countless joggers, walkers, skateboarders, break-dancers, and badmitten players lining the river. The walk was also lined with exercise equipment painted in a colorful manner so as to suggest, “working out can be fun too!” Anyone remember the creepy guy in spandex on TV with the blonde ponytail hawking something called the gazelle? A kind of ski glider? They are all over the sidewalk in this city, as are hip twisting discs and pelvic thrusters. We had quite a walk.

Making our way down to the river we took a stroll through what can only be described as a boulevard of lights. It was for a festival that had just finished but I took them as a personal Christmas light show. They even had dinosaurs and Hello Kitty lights!!!!!!

Walked around the night market and went to bed feeling jolly and full from the noodle and pork soup we had.

Phitsanulok is on the train route and mostly used as a jump-off point for people going to visit the Sukohthai ruins. This was Thailand’s Anchor Wat and we just hadn’t had our fill of stacked up stones yet.

It is amazing the contrast between the two sites. Clearly, Cambodia holds the gold for ancient sandstone ruins, it’s on their flag for pete’s sake. However, due to the very different histories and very different GDP, Thailand was better able to preserve the park itself. This may have been a choice and true, Anchor Wat is being refurbished and restored and has been for awhile, but we both felt, on the whole, that Sukohthai had a more “tended to” feel about it.

After renting bikes we didn’t need to ride around the few kilometers of park, we caught a bus back to Phitsanulok and had a relaxing night. Caught a 5am train the next morning to Bangkok.

Lounging in a train station is all well and good, and we are SO good at it by now but we felt it was in our best interest to push south towards Malaysia. The protests had calmed and they were opening the airport that night but hey, it was time to move on anyways. A direct effect of the planes not flying was that more people were taking trains. This DIRECTLY affected our ability to get cheap seats anywhere and it took a train and two buses to get over the border, but we did it and it was so worth it. Thailand is over now. There was so much we saw and did but I can’t help feeling that we only scratched the surface. It is an amazing country, varying like most, from north to south. From diving to trekking, for the chic-est of tourists to the scrubbiest of travelers, Thailand has it all. We highly recommend it and I for one, cannot wait to get back there.