The flooding danger seems to have gone away for now in the two stops I decided to skip. So, I’m going to attempt them now, starting in Chiang Saen. Chiang Saen never did flood, but it is one of the villages that they were most worried about since it’s located right on the bank of the Mekong River. And just as a precaution I decided not to sleep there and instead stay in Chiang Rai about an hour away. It’s also only a couple of hours from the last stop in Phu Chi Fa, so I spent the day there on my way to the hotel.

Chiang Saen was one of Northern Thailands ancient kingdoms going back as far as the 7th century. Today it’s a quiet riverside village with remnants from the past scattered everywhere. Seriously, ruins are around every corner! Wat That Khieo above was one of the better ruins I saw eventhough its not one of the well known ones in town.

At Wat Phra That Pha Ngao, they built this huge modern temple complex up around the partially excavated and incomplete Buddha statue they found there, seen above. I took a nice break watching the turtles and the really big fish playing. Actually they were just following me hoping for food.

Chiang Saen is pretty small and I covered it all in one day. It’s pretty remarkable that there can be such a high concentration of random and amazing ruins here and yet Chiang Saen is so little visited and off the tourist track.

The views of the Mekong River really couldn’t be beat either. This is where I stopped and had a little lunch. That’s Laos on the other side, by the way. Despite being a sleepy little village, Chiang Saens tiny port is still an important stop on the ancient China-Siam trade route.

Wat Pha Khao Pan is an active temple built on the site of this ancient Chedi with unique walking style Buddha’s. This style is really uncommon in Thailand.

It’s kind of a surreal experience to be strolling through normal residential neighborhoods and then suddenly there’s an ancient temple there. Notice the modern houses in a lot of these pics.

Wat Phra Non was the most surprising find of the day with its reclining Buddha in incredibly good condition. This thing has just been lying here for about a thousand years. Amazing!

Before going to Chiang Saen’s main event I walked through the Chiang Saen National Museum. There was a lot of artifacts in there, but once again I really liked the stone slabs with the ancient script on them. I was a bit deflated when I learned that most of them are just rice field dedications and tax declarations, but they look so cool. I can’t imagine having to file taxes with carved stone slabs!

At the western end of town by the remains of the city wall is Wat Pa Sak, the big popular ruin in town and the only one that actually charges admission.

Wat Pa Sak is in a pretty idealic spot surrounded by trees and isolated from the town. It feels more remote than it is. It was originally built in the 14th century and incredibly has a lot of the original stucco work still intact.

A lot of the details on this chedi were amazing. I spent a good amount of time walking around it and taking lots of pictures.

Right near Wat Pa Sak and the National Museum, I stopped at Wat Phra That Chedi Luang to look at some of the ruins there too. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot of info about it, but it was equally impressive.

On the way out of Chiang Saen I found yet another old temple on a side road entering another small village. It’s sitting out in the middle of a very putrid smelling pond with no way to even get to it without a boat. Yowza, that smell! It doesn’t even have a name, it’s just known as Ancient Monument No. 8. Ha! It’s looks really cool, though, with that partial Buddha statue up there.

Finally, I drove to Chiang Rai and got checked into my hotel. I’ll do Chiang Rai in the next post, though. The next morning I drove back for day two, but this time I went a bit north of Chiang Saen to Sop Ruak and an area infamously known as the Golden Triangle.

I naively thought the war on drugs began in the 1970’s, but it’s actually been going on since about 3400BC. Opium has been both a miracle drug and one of societies biggest problems for thousands of years. From roughly the 1960’s into the late 1990’s a massive percentage of the world’s opium was grown and processed right here in the Golden Triangle where the Ruak River flows into the Mekong. The name Golden Triangle comes from the fact that most of that opium was sold for gold, and because at this point the borders of three countries all meet, Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar. The rivers are the borders, just in case it wasn’t obvious.

There are two really good museums in the area. The first is the Hall of Opium, which is massive. I was in there a long time. There is so much info about the history of opium use, efforts to fight addiction and make its use illegal in various societies going back thousands of years, info about its pharmaceutical history, the growing and processing of it, the opium wars of the 19th century, it’s overwhelming! I now know more about every aspect of opium than I ever thought I would.

The other museum in the village of Sop Ruak right at the Golden Triangle is the House of Opium. This museum was a bit smaller, but had a lot more artifacts. Weights used for the opium trade, special equipment used to process the plant and extract the drug, and opium smoking paraphernalia such as pipes and everything you would need to make a comfortable opium smoking den. Both of these museums together were unbelievably interesting.

The best viewpoint of the Golden Triangle is from the top of a small hill at Wat Phra That Doi Pu Khao. It’s where the cover photo above was taken. Sop Ruak isn’t really known for ruins, but this Buddha from 1302 at the temple was pretty impressive.

After the museum visits and learning everything any human could ever want to know about opium and climbing that hill for the golden view, I strolled along the riverwalk and stopped for some delicious stir fry overlooking the Mekong and Ruak rivers. This is definitely an interesting place.

Now that I’ve explored the Golden Triangle and didn’t get washed away in a flash flood, I can start exploring Chiang Rai. Ironically, the town I thought was a safer place to stay is the one that got hit harder by floods, and that was only about a week ago. But we’ll get into the details in the next post…