Eight days in central Thailand: everything the country is famous for except the beaches

The bus from Bangkok gets in by early afternoon, which is enough time for the part of Kanchanaburi that explains the rest of it. The Thailand-Burma Railway Centre lays out how the line was surveyed, built and paid for in lives, with an upstairs café whose window looks straight down on the graves.

Cross the road when you have finished. Nearly seven thousand prisoners of war lie there in mown rows under the Commonwealth War Graves Commission's care, moved after the war from burial grounds along the track. The inscriptions the families were allowed are short and they take a while to walk past.

Eat on the water afterwards. The riverside restaurants sit on pontoons that rock when a longtail goes by.

Start at the bridge before anything is open. It is the second wartime crossing on this spot, and the two square spans in the middle replaced sections the Allies bombed out. Walking the sleepers with the river below and nobody else on the span is a very different experience from the one the coach parties get at ten.

Then go upstream. Erawan is a two hour ride north-west, a national park of limestone and forest with a waterfall of seven tiers stacked up a valley, each with a pool at the bottom of it and no rule against swimming. Climb to the top first, since the upper levels close before the gate does, and swim your way back down.

Buses run from the town bus station and take about two hours each way; a car and driver for the day costs more, gets you the bridge at dawn and the falls before the crowds, and is worth it split three ways.

A travelling day, and there is no elegant way to do it: the two towns sit on different roads out of Bangkok. Take the early bus to Suphanburi, change there for Lopburi, and count on five or six hours door to door. Eat before you start, because the connection is a bus station rather than a town.

You will arrive in the late afternoon, which is the right time to meet Lopburi. Walk into the old quarter and find Phra Prang Sam Yot, three laterite towers joined by short passages, Khmer work from the time when Angkor's writ ran this far, standing on a green island in the middle of the traffic.

The macaques are all over it and they are calmer in the evening than at midday. Watch from the railings, keep your hands empty, and go and eat in the streets behind.

Be at the palace gate when it opens. King Narai built it in 1677 with European engineers on the payroll and received French embassies inside it; the walls, the water tanks, the elephant stables and the roofless audience halls are still there, and the surviving royal buildings hold the provincial museum, restored by King Mongkut in the 1850s after a century of abandonment.

A few streets away, three low walls in a lawn are what is left of the house of Constantine Phaulkon, the Greek who rose to run Narai's government and was executed in the coup of 1688 that ended the whole experiment. It takes ten minutes to walk round and it is the strangest story in Thai history.

Save Wat Phra Sri Rattanamahathat for the late afternoon. It is opposite the railway station: a walled compound of collapsed halls around a thirteenth century prang carved with the life of the Buddha, and there is not a monkey in it.

North again, and this one is easier: a train or bus up the line to Phitsanulok, then a local bus west for an hour. Aim to be in Sukhothai by mid afternoon, drop your bag in the new town and go straight out to the old city.

The walled centre is the best of the park and the last two hours of daylight are the best of the day. Wat Maha That is the heart of it, the temple the kings of Sukhothai built for themselves: a forest of chedis around a central lotus bud tower, standing Buddhas in the corners of the terrace and a moat around the whole platform.

Then walk to Wat Sa Si, on its island in the lake, where a chedi and a row of columns are reflected in the water with a bridge across to them. The coaches have gone by five and the park is close to empty.

An hour north by road, on a bend of the Yom, stands the twin city of the kingdom, where the heir usually governed. Si Satchanalai gets a fraction of Sukhothai's visitors, sits in woodland rather than lawns, and is the better site of the two for some people.

Wat Chang Lom is the one everyone photographs: a bell shaped chedi on a square base with elephants standing out of the brickwork all the way round it. Behind it, the rows of chedis at Wat Chedi Chet Thaew are thought to be memorials to the rulers of the city, and no two are quite the same shape.

Wat Nang Phaya keeps a wall of fine floral stucco on a ruined hall, sheltered under a modest roof. Hire a bicycle at the entrance, take water, and leave time to sit by the river. On the way back, the old kilns and the ceramics museum at Sawankhalok explain what this city sold to the rest of Asia.

Start north of the walls with the single most startling thing in Sukhothai. Wat Si Chum is a square mondop, roofless now, almost entirely filled by a seated Buddha eleven metres wide, one hand resting on its knee, looking out through a slot in the wall. There is a stairway inside the thickness of that wall, closed for years at a time, which fed the legend of a temple that spoke to soldiers.

Come back into the centre for the Ramkhamhaeng National Museum, which puts the loose sculpture and the ceramics in one place and is the fastest way to understand what you have been walking around. The famous stone inscription that gave Thailand its founding story is in Bangkok; what stands here is a copy.

Finish in the southern zone, quiet and hardly visited, at Wat Chetuphon, whose image hall carried the Buddha in four postures on its four sides and whose walls are cut from slate to imitate wood.

A short last morning in New Sukhothai. The Sangkhalok museum holds a couple of thousand pieces of the glazed ware that was fired in the kilns up the river and shipped as far as Japan and Indonesia, and after a week of brick it is a good reminder that this kingdom made things as well as temples.

Then the airport, which is half an hour out of town and looks more like a garden than a terminal, or the bus station for Chiang Mai, five or six hours north.