Sukothai Countryside by Bike

The Sukothai Countryside by Bike

Thailand had a four-day weekend recently: because the Queen’s birthday / Mother’s Day (August 12) fell on a Tuesday, the Monday was declared a public holiday as well – a step toward encouraging tourism, which has been flagging. I spent the weekend in Sukothai, a north-central province. The city of Sukothai was the center of an early Thai kingdom (mid-13^th – mid-16^th C). The ruins of the old kingdom have been designated a UNESCO historic heritage site, beautifully maintained as a historic park. A fellow PCV, Kathleen, and I agreed that the best way to visit the ruins was by bike, and booked a tour online. However, there was a communication malfunction  -- the other two people in the group had requested a tour through the countryside. Since they were leaving the next day and we were staying for two more days, we opted to go with their plan – the guide could obviously do only one tour at a time. It turned out to be a super all-day tour.

We set out through villages, along the canal.The guide, who is excellent and speaks very good English (learned, he said, from watching American movies), explained that the canals were the primary means of transporting people and goods to and from the old kingdom. Our first stop was a furniture-making cooperative -- a loose organization, open to any craftsman or –woman who needs space to work and a means for sharing the expenses of the buildings (work space, storage space, show room), permissions to sell or to use specific woods (e.g., teak), and other costs. Here are a few pictures to give you an idea.

Woman working on a cabinet

Wood curing

Showroom

Continuing the tour through rice fields, we stopped to hear about the storks that eat the snails infesting the fields. Our guide said the storks had been imported to the area, though it wasn’t clear whether from somewhere else in Thailand or from another country. Here is a picture of a rice field with mountains on the horizon. I think the white specks in the distance (on the right) are storks – but I guess you know what storks look like anyway. Every time I tried to take a picture of storks that were closer by, they flew away disdainfully. Hmph.

 Our next stop was a family-owned and operated business that makes rice wine and schnapps (called lao in Thai). The smell of the mash cooking was quite, um, pungent. We each got a small glass of the wine to sample (mild-tasting with no discernible intoxicating effect), and a sip of the lao (burned the tongue as you would expect). Here are a few pictures:

Sipping and listening

Cooking the mash

Some of the pigs who eat the dregs from the process

The operation is very efficient, since the family makes only what they know they can sell and nothing is wasted. They sell their products only locally. Any aspects of the business that might perhaps be questionable are overlooked by the customers.

At some point we stopped for snacks, which the guide had brought with him – fried banana chips, mangosteen and other fruit, kanom (that all-purpose word for any sweet or salty snack food you don’t know the name of). We asked the guide what the people in the area think about the government and the plan fur returning the country to civilian rule. He almost started to talk about his opinions, then thought better of it. Not surprising.

Next we visited a family that smokes catfish for sale in Bangkok and other large cities. They don’t catch the fish themselves, but receive deliveries from their suppliers a couple of times a week. In the pictures below you can see one of the women tending a fire (picture on the left). Embers from the fire will be used to start smoky fires under the rows of fish on the table in the picture to the right.  It is hot, difficult work, but it seems that the finished product is much in demand and brings a good enough price to sustain the business.

Getting the fire going

Catfish waiting for smoke

After cycling a few more kilometers, we stopped for a great Thai lunch at a restaurant run by a friend of our guide. He ordered about 8 different dishes for us to try, half of them vegetarian. The variety was much appreciated by the others in our group, a young couple from Belgium, who had not been to Thailand before.

Riding further, we passed a temple where we stopped to listen to the story of this pig.

 The story is, she was in a truck with other pigs being driven to the slaughterhouse. Somehow she managed to jump out of the truck and run to the nearby wat. When the monks found out where she had come from, they bought her because, they believed, the fact that she had escaped the slaughterhouse meant she has good karma. She has now lived at the wat for several years, relaxing in this puddle or other comfortable wallows, depending on the season. No picture of the wat, sorry.

The continuation of our bike ride included a visit to a temple founded by one of the royal princesses and a stop to chat with villagers catching fish. I have no interesting photos from either of those. However, here is a photo of farmers harvesting rice.

 You can see that the field is very muddy, but the combining takes place anyway. The men standing in the field are catching rats tossed by the combine or scared into jumping out of the stalks. Our guide said the men and their families would have the rats for dinner that evening – probably true; it’s well known that rats and field mice are eaten by rural families in the northern and northeastern provinces of Thailand. The guide assured us that these rats are quite wholesome because they eat only rice and other natural ingredients in the rice field. I suppose that rats with a diet of fresh foods (rather than rotten garbage, like city rats) might not taste much different from other wild game, such as squirrels. But let’s not pursue that line of thought any further.

At the end of the ride, we stopped to visit a couple who make baskets, fish traps, and frog traps out of bamboo – again, friends of the guide.

Our guide said we had biked about 50 km in all – not far when you have all day to do it and many stops for learning about small businesses in the area. Kathleen and I were actually glad the young couple had requested the tour of the countryside, because on our own, we would probably have overlooked it. And anyway, our guide gave us a short version of the historic parks tour the next day – see separate post for pictures.