Jul 192011
 

We had become fatigued with Laos, so we planned to take a break by transiting from Vientiane through northeastern Thailand, before reentering Laos to the south. This would give us the break, give us access to better transportation to southern Laos, and give us the opportunity to see some of Isan, Thailand.

The plan involved a quick transit through Isan to the vicinity of Ubon Ratchathani, where we would spend the bulk of our fifteen day Thai visa exploring the Khmer ruins in this part of Thailand. We also hoped to stay stationary for ten says or so, as we were both weary of the constant moving.

Well, that was the plan As it turned out, most of our time in Isan was spent hunting for decent accommodations. Much of the reminder was spent looking for ruins that were inaccessible. All of this involved lots of time with our butts attached to motorbike or car seats.

That’s unfortunate, as it prevented us from seeing much beyond hotels and guesthouses and roadways, and negatively impacted our overall impression of this area of Thailand (a poor place to rest a sore ass tends to color the lens).

 

Border Crossing at Nong Khia

We took a taxi from the hotel in Vientiane to the Friendship Bridge into Thailand. It was a bit more expensive than taking a bus, but the convenience and time saved was well worth the money.

The processes at the bridge were efficient, enabling us to easily overcome our language challenges. They also seemed to favor us as Western visitors. On the Laotian side, we were not required to pay any fees or complete any custom forms. We were just waved through. On the Thai side, we were waved past the narcotics checkpoint.

After Laotian immigration and customs processing, we snagged one of the buses that continuously run to the Thai side for 4000 Kip each. There are also guys trying to get you into extremely-overpriced vans, but we ignored them.

On the Thai side of the border, we completed the entrance cards and were given a fifteen day visa.

Once through, we snagged a taxi to Nong Khai for 100 baht. I don’t know if this was a ripp-off or not.

 

Nong Khia

The first stop on our search for a place to stay the night was the Pantawee Hotel, which is listed in the Lonely Planet guide. It was an overpriced place with rooms that smelled, and furniture rescued from a small town diner. We moved on.

The next stop was the Nong Khai Grand Palace Hotel, also listed in the Lonely Planet guide. It was stupidly overpriced, located on the highway, and stunk of mildew (despite the obvious effort to mask the smell). The room we inspected had mIldew in the bathroom, water damage on the walls, and a mildewed carpet. The place attempts to look modern four-star, with a lobby reminiscent of a Marriott, but it isn’t worth the staying at any price.

So, we headed to a third Lonely Planet guide selection – the Mut Mee Guesthouse. This proved to be an acceptable choice, and we checked in (click here to read about it).

We walked around Nong Khia quite a bit in the short time we were there. At night, there were open air street eateries operating on the main drag; and the town appears to be pretty proud of its wats and sculpture garden. While we weren’t particularly impressed with Nong Khia while we were there, the next two weeks proved it to be the nicest place we stayed in Isan.

 

Bus Ride to Khon Kaen

We took a VIP bus to Khon Kaen. It was big and clean. It had comfortable, lay-down seats with tons of leg room. It was the first bus we had been on with a bathroom. It had air conditioning. I could have done a thousand-mile trip on this bus, had it only had a galley and a bar. This beautiful, blue bus was the best transport we had been on in two months in Thailand and Laos. I was smitten.

The sheer joy of discovering an actual bathroom on the bus can only be understood in the context of the previous two-month’s transportation experiences; where gastrointestinal issues, lack of bathroom stops, and uncertain schedules resulted in miles of anxiety.

 

 

 

Khon Kaen

As with Nong Khia, our first two hours in Khon Kaen were consumed with finding a place to stay the night.

The Piman Hotel – our first choice from the Lonely Planet description – was without a vacancy. This was a first for our travels in Thailand and Laos.

The Biggee and Biggoe – our second choice from the Lonely Planet guide – might as well have had a Motel 6 sign on the front. The Lonely Planet guide is favorable in it’s review, categorizes it as a mid-range accommodations…and is dead wrong. It’s an overpriced dump. It’s also a long ways from the city center; which wouldn’t be bad if there were restaurants and stores and the like nearby…but there aren’t.

After striking out twice, we were frustrated. The solution was to throw money at the problem and get a room at the Pullman Hotel, which is the top-end hotel in Khon Kaen (click here to read about it).

The hotel hunt was complicated a bit by language and naming differences. With the Piman Hotel, my inflection for the word “Piman” was off just enough to make it indiscernible to the tuk-tuk driver. It took help from the ladies at a different hotel and a map to sort things out, even though the Piman proved to be just around the corner.

Biggee and Biggoe is a ridiculous name for a hotel, and the Thais seem to agree, as the tuk-tuk drivers only know it as the “B and B.” Again, it took the help of a map and thr ladies at another hotel’s counter to figure this out.

Khon Kaen shows more modernization and money than most places we’ve been in Thailand. We saw no-kidding malls. There were also more Western guys with young Thai girls than we has seen in other towns. Khon Kaen seemed a impersonal and sterile and commercial.

Khon Kaen is a hard place to find a decent restaurant – at least it was for us. We walked around quite a while before throwing our hands into the air and just settling on the next place we ran into. This was a bit different from most places we had been in Thailand, where respectable restaurants and food stalls are always within a stone’s throw.

 

Bus Ride to Ubon Ratchathani

The bus was not the beautiful love machine that the bus from Nong Khia had been; but at least it had a bathroom sufficiently functional to handle a crisis, even if it did reek.

It also had a mother with a small, screaming child who the mother had obviously failed to properly train to shut the f**k up. She eventually stopped its screaming by playing a movie on a portable device at an insane volume. (Children should not be permitted into restaurants or bars, and they should not be permitted on public transportation unless they are duct-taped and placed into the cargo hold.)

 

Ubon Ratchathani

Ubon started to grow on us a little during the five days and four nights we stayed there. At first, we were under-impressed, as usual…another city with traffic and stores and all that. But, by the end, we found it to be the nicest city of all the cities we had visited in Thailand.

Don’t get me wrong…it’s still a city, which suffers in comparison with a nice, rural town any day of the week. Nonetheless, Ubon has it’s charms.

One of which is the park in its center. A lot happens here after working hours – say, after 5:00 pm – like aerobics and yoga and jogging and mini-soccer games. There’s even a muscle beach, of sorts, with outdoor weight-lifting equipment.

Next door to the park – right across the north-south running main drag – was an outdoor market / carnival combination, complete with rides and carnie games. We don’t know if the carnie stuff is a nightly standard, but the market sales operations seem to be.

In the same area, we happened upon an international wax sculpting competition, with teams from Thailand, Brazil, Nepal, and other countries.

The park area was also the focal point of preparations for the annual candle festival. This included float construction.

If you are ever in Ubon, you should check out the park and anything going on around it.

You should also check out the area around the Huay Rang Nong, a reservoir in the northeast quadrant of the city, east of the airport. At the southwest corner of the reservoir, we found the only good restaurant we ever found in Ubon, which served Thai and Laotian food (click here to read more). Just north of the restaurant – on the western shore of the reservoir – is a strip of outdoor, night eateries. We rode by these after dark, and it’s a happening place worth trying for dinner.

You should also get your own wheels, like a motorbike. Otherwise, you will be killed by tuk-tuk fares, not to mention the inconvenience. We rented a bike from a place on Suriyat Road, two blocks west of the main north-south drag – for 200 baht a day. The bike worked reasonably well, and the lady running the operation was nice enough. Also, from what we could glean, this is the only motorbike rental operation going.

You will also need your own wheels because most of the sights around Ubon are 80 kilometers or more distant. Again…no wheels, and you are f**cked.

Like Khon Kaen, restaurants in Ubon are elusive. The first night, we drove street after street without finding anything, until finally settling on a joint not worthy of further commentary. We continuously looked for a place recommended in the Lonely Planet guide without ever finding it. We tried a floating restaurant on the river, but had a beer and left after looking over an extremely over-priced menu. As mentioned above, the best options we found were on the southwest corner of the reservoir.

Hotels are also a bit of a challenge. After considerable Internet research, we settled on the Ubon Buri Hotel and Resort (click here). It was marginal and overpriced, but – despite checking out every hotel and guesthouse we came across while driving all over the place – we never found a better alternative. In the end, the inability to find clean, quiet, private, reasonably-priced accommodations – suitable for an extended stay – is what caused us to move on.

Although food and housing were challenging, Ubon eventually got our attention with it’s small-town sense of community and its lack of Western tourists. For a city, it ain’t so bad.

 

Motorbike Ride to Khong Chiam

During our stay in Ubon, as part of the hunt for better housing, we did a 200 kilometer round-trip motorbike ride to Khong Chiam and back, riding tandem. Khong Chiam (sometimes spelled Khong Jiam) is east of Ubon, on the Mekong River.

200 kilometers (124 miles) on a 125cc motorbike is an endurance test. Our legs, butts, and backs were not happy when it was over. It’s also mentally exhausting, having to constantly negotiate an obstacle course of crazed car and truck drivers, stopped vehicles, tractors, carts, other motorbikes, bicyclists, dogs, chickens, cows, water buffaloes, and potholes.

But our reconnaissance of Khong Chiam showed potential, as it is a small town with several accomodations and restaurants.

Back at Ubon, we rented a car and packed our things for Khong Chiam.

 

Khong Chiam

Our hunt for accomodations was extensive, including the town and outward about ten kilometers. There are scores of hotels and guesthouses squirreled away, ranging from the extremely expensive Tohsang resort to some few-dollar-a-night shacks. We ended up in a bungalow at the Baansuanrimnam Resort and Restaurant (click here).

What looks like a better lodging option – perhaps the best in Khong Chiam – is the Khong Chiam Homestay about three kilometers west of the town on Highway 2222. This operation is a compound of nice-looking bungalows, and should not be confused with the in-town operation of the same name referenced by the Lonely Planet guide. Unfortunately, it was closed for renovations when we were in Khong Chiam.

Khong Chiam has a handful of national parks nearby, but we never saw them. The gastrointestinal issues from Laos had returned, and we spent our time trying to that back in the box.

After two nights in Khong Chiam, we lost our bungalow to the town’s annual candle festival, which had locked up all decent accommodations long before. Busload after busload of Thai tourists was descending upon Khong Chiam.

 

Drive to Surin

The drive out of Khong Chiam started with a bang, as a young woman on a motorbike slammed into our rental car. Thais drive on the left. I was turning right, from the left lane; she was racing up behind me and decided to pass me on the right at a pretty good clip. The combination was not good, and she ended up face down in a gravel parking lot after bouncing off my right-front quarter panel. The accident got lots of initial attention, until she claimed to be OK and drove off. Folks dispersed, and we were left with a couple of scratches in our rental car.

On the outskirts of Khong Chiam, while turning around on the side of the road, a guy in a wheelchair selling fish from a cart flipped me off, twice. That’s a first for our travels in Southeast Asia. Jen thinks he may have been mentally challenged, but I can’t say that his being a short-buser would make the flip-off more palatable.

With that as our “bon voyage,” we headed west, toward areas with Khmer ruins, expecting to find decent accommodations a little west of Ubon. After driving about 200 kilometers west of Ubon, through Si Saket and onward, we stopped for the night in Surin. The place we stayed was the Surin Majestic Hotel, which has a majestic view of the city bus terminal (read more by clicking here).

The next morning, we headed south to Prasat. Other than the hotel, nearby bus station, and roads we traveled, we saw absolutely nothing of Surin.

 

Prasat

We rolled into Prasat in a last-ditch effort to salvage something of our two weeks in Isan.

Prasat is somewhat central to several Khmer ruins. It is thirty or so kilometers south of Surin, so it was a fairly quick drive; for which I was most grateful after the pain and near-death experiences of driving the day before.

The first order of business was finding a place to stay, which had been an almost impossible task so far in Isan. Having had the luxury of a bit of Internet access the prior night, we had found two places to check out.

First of these was Ban Naa Cottages, located in the village of Ban Samut, which is eight kilometers northwest of Prasat on route 3011. This joint consists of some multi-room buildings and stand-alone bungalows surrounding a tiny pool and restaurant/bar seating. Everything is crammed into a small space. It might have been a go for us, save for the family that owns it. Like most places we’ve stayed in Thailand, the owners live on the grounds; but this particular configuration – with kids swimming in the pool and eating in the dining area while watching television – felt too much like we were entering someone’s house.

The next place we checked was Ryan’s Resort, located six kilometers east of Prasat off Highway 24. It’s a walled compound with some multi-room buildings and stand-alone bungalows, again surrounding a pool and bar / restaurant area. Like the other place, this was a bit too close quarters for us. Other people, however, might find it pleasantly communal.

We settled on Surie Guesthouse, which we didn’t find on the internet, but rather by driving to see the other two places. It’s located just a couple kilometers northwest of Prasat on route 3011 (click here to read more).

Having found a place to stay, we started the search for some Khmer ruins, beginning with one just outside Prasat – Prasat Ban Pluang. This site consists of a single structure with remnants of a surrounding moat. It’s in the middle of rural housing, and other than the guy collecting ticket money and a couple of kids running around, we were alone.

We followed this with a full-day hunt for ruins. A couple hours drive from Prasat, on the Cambodian border, down some bad stretches of roadway, is Prasat Ta Meuan. It’s suppose to be remote and good, but we may never know, because we were stopped three kilometers from it by an army checkpoint that refused to let us continue. The Thais and Cambodians had had a border skirmish a few months earlier at a different, nearby set of ruins; so maybe that’s what shut down access to this one.

Off we went, this time toward the Phanom Rung Historical Park. This was another two hours of driving on shitty roads.

Phanom Rung is big, but it’s also heavily touristed by Thais. It has trinket stands and eateries galore outdid the entrance to the park. It has a big and full parking lot. It is not quiet or serene or peaceful. The carpet of tourists ruined its photographic potential. It was more like visiting an amusement park than like visiting ancient ruins. We walked around and left.

By now, it was getting late, our asses were sore, and we had had enough. We drove another two hours back to Prasat for the night.

So, the search for ruins to photograph was not particularly successful. But it did contribute considerably to my time behind the wheel of the car.

 

Driving a Car in Thailand

Driving a car in Thailand is the most dangerous driving I have ever done. I felt eminently safer driving a HMMWV down IED-infested roads in Iraq. Italy is a country of old-lady drivers by comparison.

Other drivers will pass on blind turns and on the shoulder, pressing to near collision with oncoming traffic before jerking back into their lane. This is done at high speed, on marrow roadways congested with slow trucks, pedestrians, motorbikes, vehicles stopped in the shoulder, farm equipment, dogs, and cattle.

Add to this the biggest and most numerous potholes I have ever seen. In one day I think I hit more potholes than all my prior three decades of driving, combined. These are not shallow potholes – many are close to a foot deep.

In general, I feel much safer riding a motorbike than I do driving a car. A motorbike doesn’t compete as much for roadway, and it can dodge potholes more easily. A car doesn’t have the same amount of space to maneuver away from the crazy Thai drivers.

Cars are also very expensive to rent. We were quoted $50 US and up, per day, to rent an economy-sized car. That doesn’t include insurance or gasoline (which runs about$6 US a gallon). In the end, we got a car for an average of $30 US, including insurance. Toss in fuel costs, and it jumped to about $40 US for the luxury of a car; which equated to over half our daily expenses. Compare all this to a motorbike, which can be operated for about $7 US a day, and do just about anything you would want a car to do.

 

Impressions of Isan

Thanks to never finding a decent place to settle for a couple of weeks, we ended up driving hundreds of kilometers in southeastern Isan, including parts of Ubon Ratchathani, Surin, Si Saket, and Buriram provinces. Add to this the bus ride down the center of Isan. So, even though we didn’t get to hang out in any one place for long, we did see a lot of the area.

So, what do we think?

The terrain is flat. OK, that’s not very profound, but flat makes for generally less interesting scenery than do mountains or hills.

Jen didn’t find it photographically inspirational; although it’s so flat she’d love to bike it (on one of those bikes that you peddle).

Isan has generally poor accommodations at generally excessive prices.

Isan has less Western tourists (the exception being the old white dudes seeking young Thai girls in cities like Udon Thani and Khon Kaen); but it has loads of Thai tourists (something we did not see in northern Thailand).

Isan has a lesser number of decent restaurants. In fact, it can be hard to find a place to eat.

In general, Isan is expensive, which I found surprising. I have read and heard that Isan is the poorest part of Thailand, where $200 US per month is a middle-class income. I am now questioning the accuracy of these statements. $6.00 US a gallon for gas ain’t cheap. I saw an add on a beat-up, ten-year-old Honda car asking $1400 US, and that ain’t cheap. $10 US and up for a dinner for two ain’t cheap. $25 US and up for a hotel room ain’t cheap. $2 US for a quart of beer ain’t cheap.

The northwestern corner of Thailand still remains our favorite place.

 

And, Next…

From here, we are heeding back into Laos via Chong Mek.  First stop is the Khmer ruins at Champasak, and from there it’s farther south to the 4,000 Islands area. After that, it’s into Cambodia.

No matter what, we are leaving for Australia on September 1st, as we have plane tickets in hand. We are going to do a couple months of hiking through Western Australia to wear off all the Chang and Singha and BeerLao we’ve been downing.

 

 Posted by at 1:40 am