Sukhothai

On Thursday, we got a bus from Chiang Mai to Sukhothai. I'd been here before but Jeff hadn't and we thought it might be nice to visit again and do a bit more cycling.

Things went somewhat wrong on the first night that we arrived. We left the guesthouse and went for dinner at a food stall beside the round. Dinner was quite tasty and certainly cheap. When we went to pay, Jeff noticed that his wallet was missing. To this day, we have no idea what happened to it but we suspect a pickpocket. We spent the rest of the evening searching around the locations that we'd been to that evening but to no avail.

The next morning, the owner of the guesthouse very kindly gave us a lift to the police station so that we could report the theft. "Will the police speak English?" we asked as he dropped us off? Of course they would, he assured us, and sped off.

As it turned out, although the police had a better command of English than we had of Thai, they still couldn't speak much and we spent a long time pointing to the appropriate phrases in our Thai phrasebook. Sadly, the phrasebook didn't have a pre-canned phrase for "My wallet has gone missing and I think that it has been stolen but I'm not 100% sure". In the end, two policemen gave us a lift back to the scene of the crime, before taking us to the TAT (Tourism Agency of Thailand) tourist information center where we found someone bilingual in Thai and English who could translate for us. While we were doing this, two motorbikes collided outside and one of the policemen sprang into official mode to deal with it.

The cops then told us that we'd need to come back to the police station with them in order to make a statement so we got back into their police truck. On the way, a call came through on the radio and we ended up diverting to *another* traffic collision. This one looked a bit more serious and we spent a lot of time in the back of the police truck before eventually heading back to the station.

Jeff's wallet never did turn up and we can only assume that a Thai pickpocket somewhere is feeling very pleased with his evening's work.