Nong Khai

This past weekend was another 3 day weekend (or 4 day because of a WorldTeach meeting in the city on Thursday).  Although I would have been happy to stay and relax in Kut Chim, I felt a need to wander and explore.  Rita, Ben, Peter, and I made plans to travel to Nong Khai to do just that.

After our meeting, we thought it best to crash at Jes’ house so we’d be able to leave early Friday morning.  It was nice to relax in such a cozy setting.  We went to an amazing restaurant for dinner, and even baked M&M cookies for dessert. Ovens are few and far between, so when Jes acquired one, we were all pretty excited to use it!  Pi Nok helped us with the bus schedule and we were set to leave at 5:30 to catch an early bus.  Sure enough though, we found out that the earliest bus wasn’t running so we’d have to leave at 9 instead.  Mai pen rai, a lazy morning sounded nice, and we’d still get to Nong Khai with enough daylight to find our way around.  The next morning, Pi Nok went to the bus station before we woke up just to ensure we’d get tickets and the right information.  She came back with tickets (just 2 for the boys…) for 11:30 am.  Turns out something happened to the 9 am bus and we’d have to leave even later! Such is life in Thailand.

The bus was pretty uneventful, except that it stopped quite often to let people on and off the bus – making the journey much longer than it needed to be.  We arrived in Nong Khai right after sunset and needed to find a place to stay ASAP.  After spotting a farang couple on the bus, Peter, in typical fashion, started jabbering at them in English. Turns out they spoke French, woops. Mai pen rai, Peter speaks French too!  They told him where they were staying and gave us directions and we were on our way! They turned out to be staying at a hostel that was raved about in our Lonely Planet guides, so we knew we were in for a lot of tourists, which wasn’t exactly what we wanted, but we just needed a place to call home for the next few days.

What we neglected to think about though, was that it was a holiday weekend, and even Thais would be traveling to Nong Khai because it is one of two cities with a friendship bridge to Laos.  So the cool looking hostel was booked, and so was the next one, and so on all the way down the riverwalk.  We started to get a little nervous that we would be sleeping on the street, and I could sense Peter’s dad instincts setting in.  No chance he’d let us be both hungry AND homeless. But once we reached the end of the walkway we saw a little shop with a sign “wanna guest house.”  Well in fact, yes, we do wanna guest house.  There was one room left, on the third floor, with its own private balcony overlooking the river, AC, hot water, and 1 king sized bed.  What luxury, especially at about 4 dollars each a night.  Being used to sleeping on rock hard mattresses, the boys graciously let Rita and I take the bed – Thanks guys!

Despite our sleeping predicament, we immediately fell in love with Nong Khai.  It had a riverwalk just like NKP, but shops separated it from a busy road instead.  It’s a quiet, and clean, and also has everything you’d expect to find in a city.  We were, of course, taken a back by all the tourists and giant ex-pat population, but we took the opportunity to meet some of them.  We met a guy, Ryan, from Oregon, who’d just finished a month of teaching in a small village in another Isan province.  He was then taking the opportunity to travel around a bit, and was paying for his stay by playing guitar at the hostel’s restaurant.  He had similar stories to share, and it was fun to converse with someone outside the WorldTeach circle.  He even led us to an awesome sidewalk restaurant away from the fancy dancy riverwalk where we feasted on som tom, sticky rice, and rotisserie chicken.  It was so much fun to wander this beautiful city!

On Saturday, we spent a few hours at a sculpture park.  We’d read about in the guidebook, but we weren’t expecting much at all.  We pulled up, and were blown away by the sheer size and number of all the bizarre sculptures.  Unfortunately all the explanations were in Thai, so we didn’t really understand the purpose of the sculptures. We started out taking normal pictures, but then we decided it would be fun to pose in the same positions of the statues.  And thus began a hilarious photo shoot.  We probably made quite a scene, but we enjoyed it immensely.

One of the best parts of the weekend was surprising all the locals with our knowledge of the Thai language.  Being a pretty large tourist town, people would just start speaking English with us.  We'd try to reply in Thai as much as possible, and everyone was so impressed with what we knew. It was definitely an awesome feeling.

This weekend reinforced what I LOVE about traveling.  Finding yourself in a new place without a plan and just wandering around for a while.  Meeting new people, seeing new sights, and enjoying whatever happens. 

For pictures of the crazy sculpture park:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2072718&id=1326450028&l=a9f5e654e1