Surin Photos



Back to Thailand! Despite spending a full month in the country earlier, we never made it to the north, so we're back now to do just that. Our path from Laos took us through Surin, which is very near Phanom Rung, one of the four great Khmer temples. So we decided to stop for a day and visit the majestic monument.

We were in Surin on the eve of the king's birthday and our hotel was right next to a festival celebrating the occassion. There was elephant petting, a stage with strange freestyle dancers, and scads of street vendors who seemed to only sell food in which egg was one of the main ingredients. We were also amused to discover that our hotel's phone system was based around a manual switchboard.

Getting to the temple was a bit difficult and required us to get off the bus at an unmarked road junction and then find motorcycles to take us the rest of the way. There were quite a few people visiting the temple, but we seemed to be nearly the only westerners. The others seemed to be local s who had driven their own cars there, from Bangkok I assume. It sits atop what is supposedly a spent volcano, although I wouldn't have known that if I hadn't read it. The temple itself was quite nice, well worth the trouble and we didn't have to wait long afterward before we were able to flag down a bus to Bangkok.