wat mae chon

Spotted on our second day in Sukhothai National Park, on route to Wat Si Chum.

On the first day, we'd stayed in the 'Central Zone' of the Old City, cycling around the grounds and stopping occasionally to do some drawing. The following day, we decided to explore the various zones beyond the city walls, but our coach to Bangkok was leaving in the afternoon so we were in something of a hurry. The receptionist at the hotel had told us that we absolutely must see the large statue of the Buddha — the largest in Sukhothai — at Wat Si Chum, and also to visit Wat Saphan Hin, a hilltop temple situated to the west of the city.

I was paranoid about encountering deadly snakes on my trip and was frequently witnessed gesticulating wildly and shouting 'COBRA!' whilst running away from lengths of hosepipe, electricity cables etc., so it was with some irony that the only snake I, ahem, came across during my stay was a dead one lying in the road that I ran over on my bike. At least, that's what J told me. I didn't see it as I was consulting a map at the time. If I had seen it, I imagine it would have been at least fifty feet long and would have had a glimmer of life about it, just enough in fact to stretch up and try and give me a fatal bite with it's dying breath. So, my running over the unfortunate reptile was a very brave act indeed...

Click on the image to see a larger version.

yaksha

Photographed at the Grand Palace, Bangkok, these giant statues — representing demons from the Ramayana — watch over the Emerald Buddha and ward off evil spirits.

steinbeck

holiday reading material

patterns

school milk

A plastic pouch of school milk that Dirty D 'liberated' from her place of work. She said that not all the kids wanted it, so there was milk to spare, but I like to think that she deliberately stole this rich source of calcium from her charges, thus hampering their physical development and giving them all brittle bones in later life. Dirty by name...

On a technical note, this sketch is, for me, a rare foray into pen and watercolour wash, largely because I can't find a pen that I'm comfortable with that will take waterproof ink. Before I'm beseiged by cries of 'Noodler's Ink!, Noodler's Ink!', that's what I used here, but I'm still not happy with it. Although it's much better than other inks I've used, it's still not 100% waterproof and my favourite Parker fountain pen doesn't seem to like it very much. So until I find a better 'colouring-in' solution, I'm sticking with Photoshop.

guide

The 'breakfast sweets' in question were like small suet puddings wrapped up in banana leaves. One had some unidentified purple fruit inside whilst the other contained sweetcorn. Like most desserts in Thailand they were incredibly sweet but as long as you didn't eat the whole thing, you managed to avoid instant diabetes.

We took the overnight bus to Khuraburi and arrived on the morning of the 21st December. We were supposed to arrive at 7am but the coach driver must have had his foot down as we reached our destination at around 5am. We hung around for an hour or so, then walked to a nearby market for a breakfast of rice soup and bananas. The rice soup was fresh, tasty and laced with a liberal amount of ginger — a good pick-me-up after a rather inconsistent night's sleep on the coach. More about the bananas later...

An hour or so later we were dropped off at a dock where the speedboat we'd booked ourselves onto was due to take us across to the island of Ko Surin. However, we couldn't leave until all the other passengers turned up and it was another couple of hours before they did. In the mean time, the staff of the boat company (Greenview) looked after us, gave us tea, coffee and the aforementioned sweets, and, having discovered she could speak Thai fluently, chatted to J.