Loei - Dan Sai

Just a quick note on the side. Take Route 2013 to Dan Sai if you enjoy driving on serpentine roads. I've done the tour three times including once during the middle of the night. That's exciting to drive through sharp turns at speeds where your tyres squeal like pigs when you cannot see what's beyond reach of your headlights. 

If you continue to Phu Ruea, there is a national park as well as good 4WD tracks. 

On the way to Phu Ruea, you pass Chateau de Loei, Thailand's first commercial winery. 

Loei - Phi Ta Khon

Every year in June or July (the date is not fixed), the town of Dan Sai hosts the Phi Ta Khon (or Pee Ta Khon) festival. This year, the festival fell on a weekend so the number of visitors topped 60,000 - hotels as far away a Loei City (80 km away) were fully booked as the festival had been promoted even on CNN. 

The ceremony usually starts as early as 3 AM with a parade of men from Phon Chai Temple in Dan Sai district to the Man River. Before sunrise, they perform a rite to invite Phra Up Pa Khut, which is considered to be a white marble representation of a holy monk having supernatural powers that can change his form to be whatever he likes to be. The procession will then bring Phra Up Pa Khut back to the temple where the sacred worship will begin.

The colourful activities begin on the second day at dawn with local people dressed as Phi Ta Khon. They cheerfully perform and dance around the village in the afternoon.  Beautifully decorated cars make up the street parade adorned by colourful flowers and candles. Late on the second day, bamboo rockets will be launched into the sky to encourage rain clouds to soak the fields prior to rice planting.


Phi Ta Khon is one half of a festival known as 'Bun Pha Ves.' The other half is the Bun Bang Fai, a festival held to "celebrate" fertility -- the Phi Ta Khon dancers cheerfully wave giant wooden phalluses around and the rockets are also potent symbols of male virility. 

Loei - Chiang Khan

A visit to Chiang Khan was to me like a blast from the past - a past long gone. As little as nine years ago, Chiang Khan was a sleepy little town. There was nothing unusual about the town, nothing to keep passers-through from not simply passing through. Today, the town has converted a stretch of a narrow street (along the banks of the Mekong River) into "how rural Thailand once was".

It is about as real as Disneyland, but Bangkokians ignore the "make believe" aspects and focus on the cute photo opportunities provided. The atmosphere is fake, but Bangkokians can come up and wander along the street, take pictures, check out tacky souvenirs, and hang out in retro-style cafes and mini-bars in their designer clothes. The main hassle the city slickers face is the scarcity of parking space.


Personally, I prefer to stay a bit further down the river. The Mekong at Chiang Khan is quite wide and do not seem to flow anywhere. A few kilometers downriver, however, the Mekong breaks up into pools of still water during the dry season, while it flows at a rapid pace in a narrow canal close to the Laotian side.

Phitsanulok - Phu Hin Rong Kla National Park (2)

As I wrote, to approach this national park from the east (i.e., from Lomsak) is the best option by far if you like to drive up serpentine roads enjoying wonderful views.

http://tinamue.blogspot.com/2010/01/phu-hin-rong-kla-national-park.html

This time, I started at the other end of the park and therefore had to drive down the serpentine road. Such a descent has never before been a challenge. However, this time, I was not only driving a car with automatic gearshift (next to no engine brake) but I was also driving a Toyota Fortuner - a vehicle notorious for its weak brakes. 2/3 down, the brakes had gotten so warm that they stopped working. I pulled over, swearing, and missing my sturdy D-Max with manual gearshift.

Not being an overly patient driver, I soon decided to ignore that minor issue and continued rolling down in the lowest gear possible.

Loei - Suan Hin Pha Ngam (2)

A new year, a new visit. This time, I managed to find the way on my own without the help of an entrepreneurial park ranger

http://tinamue.blogspot.com/2010/12/loei-suan-hin-pha-ngam.html

This time, I paid a small fee, which covered transport in a rustic taek-taek - one of many that line up to take people to (or from) one end of the walking trail.

Moreover, a guide also caught up with me, but after seeing that I knew my way along the trail and verified that I'd been there before, she didn't provide an explanation of any kind to any of the things we encountered on the trail.

Anyway, it was still an enjoyable trek through and past various rock formations and "gardens" (mini forests). And the view from the top is quite impressive.