From Udon Thani it’s just a short drive south to another important northeastern Thailand city, Khon Kaen. I’ll have to turn in my rental car when I arrive and pick up another rental car when I leave (long story), so I’m going to spend the day seeing a few out of the way sites before losing the car and checking in at my hotel. I started with a cruise through Phu Wiang National Park and a quick hike to the Tat Fa Waterfall.

After hiking down to the falls, I went the other direction, up, to the Chom Tawan Cliff for a pretty amazing view. I’m still so thankful for the lower humidity in this part of the country.

I wasn’t aware of this when I was planning my trip, but this is apparently dinosaur country. There are a lot of fossil sites all over this region and all the little villages I drive through have giant dinosaur statues in front of buildings, in the middle of roundabouts, etc. The most interesting site to visit as a casual traveler, though, seemed to be the Phu Wiang Dinosaur Footprints site. These prints were left by smaller dinos, but what a really cool stop.

This part of the country was more associated with the Dvaravati culture in the 6th to 11th centuries and later, the Khmer empire, rather than the kingdoms in western Thailand. As a result there are several small Khmer ruins scattered around the area. Also on my way into Khon Kaen I stopped at Prasat Puay Noi, probably the biggest Khmer site I ended up seeing in the area, which isn’t saying much because they were all kind of compact.

The best part about Prasat Puay Noi was all the left over lintel carvings. It’s always better finding these things in the wild rather than a museum.

The best one was this incredible and rare carving of the Hindu god Shiva. How is THIS not in a museum?!

When I arrived in Khon Kaen, my first stop was to the airport to turn in the rental car. Then I got a Grab into the city. Grab is the Uber here in Asia, very convenient and very cheap. I’ve been using it quite a lot. Just type in where you want to go, confirm, and a guy on a motorbike in a green jacket suddenly shows up to zip you wherever you need to go. Awesome! I had one day in Khon Kaen to see the sites, which was more than enough, starting with the Khon Kaen National Museum.

Most of the artifacts in the Museum were from the Dvaravati culture. This place had a huge collection of intricately carved Dvaravati boundary stones. Some of the best examples are seen above and below.

The unofficial focal point of Khon Kaen is the Bueng Kaen Nakhon Reservoir. Mostly it’s a giant park with the lake in the middle and walking paths all around. On my way around part of it, I made a quick stop at the Bung Tao Gong Ma Chinese Shrine. I don’t really have any information about it and since there was no fortune telling going on inside like in Udon, it was just a quick look.

The most important temple in town is Phra Mahathat Kaen Nakhon. The temple wasn’t super interesting as far as temples go. But I went for the view. Once inside you can climb the stairs up to the ninth floor, almost to the top, to enjoy some great views of Khon Kaen and the lake. The breeze up there also felt pretty refreshing.

Every level of Phra Mahathat Kaen Nakhon has great tile work of all kinds of animals. The best one was this giant dinosaur though. I had to do some pretty creative panorama work to get it all in one picture. It was huge!

And that was about it for Khon Kaen, except for their really great night market. I didn’t go to single restaurant here either, just like in Udon. I pigged out on Thai street food every night. The next morning I checked out of my hotel and booked a Grab back to the airport to get my next rental car and then broke up my drive to the next stop visiting several cool Khmer ruins along the way.

All of the artifacts in the Khon Kaen National Museum came from these sites. That’s where I learned about them and I stood there in the middle of that museum and marked them all on the GPS. The only one I knew about before coming here was Prasat Puay Noi from the drive in.

These places were all pretty small, but I really enjoyed exploring them. It would’ve been a shame to miss these. I also enjoyed the drive, passing through all these random tiny villages surrounded by rice fields all day. The rice is almost ready for harvesting, which means it’s full and green everywhere. Beautiful!

These last two sites were just about a mile from each other. They both had some incredible lintel work left behind. In the pic below you can see several of them above the door frames.

I thought this day was going to be nothing but driving, but thanks to the National Museum, it turned out to be much more productive than I anticipated. Now it’s time to finish my drive to the far southeast corner of Thailand and some more of this little visited part of the country. Until the next post…