Nong Khai: Sculpture Park and Lazy River Afternoon

With an early start on a very hot day, we decided to forgo the bicycling as a result of yesterday. We rented a motorbike and headed to the Sculpture Park that Nong Khai is famous for. Story has it that a Buddhist Laotian spent a few years living underground with a hermit in the mountains of Laos when he was younger. Back in society, he maintained a lot of his mentor’s thoughts on life. He created a less impressive sculpture park in Laos, and with the communist takeover in the 1970s, he fled across the Mekong into Nong Khai and started work on his second sculpture park. The sculptures are massive and hugely impressive: an eclectic mix of Buddhist folk tales and Hindu mythology, the park looms with concrete figures almost one hundred feet tall. It was very impressive and a great way to spend a few hours in the morning.

Our favorite sculptures were the very detailed circle of life according to Buddhism and the sculpture of Buddha sitting on a throne made from the coiled body of a snake with seven heads. Very impressive!

After our sculpturing, we drove to the Mekong to see the sunken Chedi. During a particularly wet year in the 1800s, a Buddhist temple started its century long slide into the center of the Mekong. Now, you can only see about the top ten feet of the temple during the dry season (or very early rainy season as it so happens).

Back at Mut Mee, we spent the afternoon relaxing in the garden. The breeze blowing off the river combined with the whirring hum of the overhead fans led to a drowsily beautiful afternoon. We both had what we thought would be our last Thai massage, caught a tuk tuk to the train station, and got settled in for our 12 hour journey to Bangkok.

We watched the sunset in northern Thailand, and watched it rise in Bangkok without much eventfulness in between. We slept most of the way, not great, but well enough that the time passed pretty quickly. Our first overnight train and we didn’t even have anything stolen!