I woke up quite late only thanks to voices and ringing glasses behind my door where the dining table was. As I opened the door the first Manop’s move was grabbing one of the fried flying ants form a full deep plate they were in and offering it to me. I was still only waking up so I apologetically refused and first went to do my morning hygiene. It was quite funny thouth :-).

I tried a few of those fried ants later and it wasn’t too bad. Only with my stomach not feeling 100% after it had the upset in Chiang Mai I couldn’t eat much more. I had one more table-spoon-full later with my egg omelet and that felt better.

After I took a few pictures of Manop and Tanad in uniforms in front of their police cars on their own request I thanked them all, said good-bye and was heading towards Sukhothai via Si Satchanalai.

Since my plan for today didn’t seem too full I decided to try to follow one more waterfall marker. This time it was complimented by a marker suggesting a giant (yamala?) three in the same direction. After riding about 10km I found myself heading the wrong way as the markers were now showing in the opposite direction than I traveled. The markers are really “well” done – they almost never show the distance to the sight, and you can see three of them on a 100m stretch along the road and then when you should turn they don’t put it there at all. If they do then the distance before the actual turn is not set and can be anywhere between zero meters and 20 kilometers. The color coding of these signs I haven’t deciphered yet either, although they are mostly blue (but not always.. go figure). Well, I guess this gives me an opportunity to say also something nice about Australia after I wrote mostly negatively about its drivers…  So… I think that the tourist markers in Australia are great, although not as numerous as here in Thailand. However, they are where they are helpful and they have a unified design with unified color coding so when you see a brown sign you can tell from a distance that there is a tourist marker.

OK, back to my waterfall “excursion”. I found the turn and then another after riding another 10 or 15km. This last turn was off the “main” road to a narrower, visibly only local road. It didn’t take long before this road changed to dirt road. At the beginning it looked fine and I thought to myself “OK, I can do this, no worries”. I asked some local worker how far the waterfall was and got a reply of “7”. OK, that wasn’t too far either. Let’s go. However, after 5 km, after the road was getting narrower and narrower it started to get muddy too, followed by quite dangerous hand made wooden gangplanks. Some of them were so narrow that if I wanted to put my feet down I couldn’t and would fall off it into the water flowing underneath. These things were making me really nervous as if I slipped from one of them I would really be in a big trouble. These gangplanks were more and more often preceded and followed by muddy patches, grass and/or wheel ruts where in between of these was wet grass. Needless to say, I was shaking thanks to trying to keep the bike balanced while sliding into wheel ruts on the road, feeling even less safe thanks to my by now completely bold rear tire and also thanks to my nerves that were being tried hard. After riding almost 9km (remember? – it was supposed to be 7) I decided that I couldn’t go any further and before another, this time a concrete gangplank consisting of two quite narrow slabs I turned back, while fearing the first 3 km of my return path that were really quite horrible. I’m happy now… what I say.. VERY HAPPY that I did make it even though I did have two very scary moments on the gangplanks.

My attempt to see the giant tree ended up in similar manner. When I ended up in a backyard of a set of houses after following the official sign again I gave up trying and went back towards the highway.

On the road I started seeing signs to Si Satchanalai Historical Park (N17.42745 E99.77840) along with “Sukhothai Historical Park”. I didn’t know about the first one but I checked it out. It was on my way first. After the usual few tourist marker misdirections I  found a group of old wats spread around the road in the forest and on the meadows. They were quite different from all the many wats I had seen until then in Thailand. AND!, I was there completely alone (well, if you don’t count the herd of cows and the local “cowboy” taking them to a new pasture). I loved that place!

(483km)