Red lotus sea

There is a lake in the north part of Kumphawapi district which is worth a visit.

From December untill March this large lake is filled with lotusses. It is amazing to see this, the whole lake looks like a large lotus field. It is called “Talee Bua Daeng” (actually the lotusses are pink and not red).

We took a boat tour on the lake with is amazing.

This is a popular attraction and it is advertised in Thai, but I think is is not well known among Farang.
Especially nice to surprise your gf/wife on Valentines day with a boat tour on the lotus lake.

It is advised to go there in the morning, because in the afternoon the flowers will close. The flowers will bloom from December to March.

There are signs at the side of Motorway route 2 between Udon and Kumphawapi and at Pan Don village. Follow the signs (banners at the side of the road) with the text “Talee bua daeng” in Thai.

The access point to the lake is in a village Ban Diam, which is just south of PrajakSinlapakhom town. In Ban Diam village, the access to the lake is at the backside of the temple.

Udon Thani Museum

Udon Thani Museum is an important historical attraction of Udon Thani since it gathers the history of Udon Thani inside. The visitors will get to know about Udon Thani in various aspects.

Udon Thani Museum is a learning center and also publishes the background of Udon Thani. The importance of the museum as a source of learning is to provide content and knowledge with the cultural heritage, history, archeology, art, culture, and tradition, including lifestyle of Udon Thani people from the past to the present.

The museum is aimed to disseminate the background of Udon Thani and presents the content to create a unity of Udon Thani people by providing the history of Luang Ta Maha Bua Yannasampanno, the Buddhist saint of Udon Thani and also presenting the background of Krom Luang Prachak Silpakom, the founder of Udon Thani.

Udon Thani City Museum was established inside the Rachinuthit Building, the old building built during the reign of King Rama VI. The museum has been open to the public since January 18, 2004, the date of the establishment of Udon Thani, where the city people celebrated the 111th anniversary.

It is located at Pho Si Road, near Wat Phothisomphorn. The building was built in 1920 by Intendant Phraya Sri Suriyarachvaranuwat, Intendant of Udon Thani, as well as officials, merchants, and people in the on the purpose of using it as a school building for Nari Upatham School. It was completed in 1925 and renamed by His Majesty the King as “Rachinuthit” which has become the name of this building since then.

Rachinuthit Building was used as the office building for the promotion of women’s culture in 1930 and in 1960, it was used as Office of the Regional Education Development Project. Until 1973, it became Regional Education Office No.9 and Udon Thani Provincial Cultural Office, respectively. It is a 2-storey western-style building made of brick with the hip roof, the porch, and the curved arches.

Find out more
How to travel to Udon Thani

From Bangkok, follow Highway No.1 (Phahon Yothin) to Saraburi and in the area of Km. 107 turn onto Highway No. 2 (Mitraphap) passing Nakhon Ratchasima, Khon Kaen, to Udon Thani. The total distance is 564 kilometers.

Address Mak Khaeng Mueang Udon Thani Udon Thani 41000 Telephone No.042 245 976

CentralPlaza Udon Thani

New Central Plaza Udon Thani

UD TOWN

UD TOWN The premium lifestyle mall of Indo-china drawing more customers with creative and distinguished activities and events to take customers to the next level of the joy of life with the new concept

Our customers will find it fun and entertaining every festive season. With our outstanding identity as one of the largest lifestyle open-air malls, our customers will be provided with convenience in commuting, in accessing shops, and parking. They can be enjoyable everyday with us.

UD TOWN has been operated for business since December 2009. Currently 95 per cent of the shopping space was occupied by retail tenants. The 13,000-square-metre more than 90 retail tenants with direct access to the preferred shops, including 2,000-square-metre TESCO Lotus supermarket open 6a.m. to midnight, while the 10,000-square-metre UD Bazaar lifestyle market has around 200 small local tenants. Both are located on a 25-rai plot close to the railway station in the centre of Udon Thani. The city is also a transport hub for other I-san provinces as well as Laos and Vietnam andabout 2.2 million Thai and foreign tourists visited the north-eastern city every year. Udon Thani is also one of the most expat people living city in Thailand

Started with attract to local visitors, UD TOWN now developed to become a new tourist attraction for people in Udon Thani’s outskirt area such as Khon Kaen, Nhong Kai, Sakon Nakorn, and also visitors from Bangkok and Vientiane, Laos.Statistic shows that UD TOWN attracts more than 25,000 regular shoppers a day and most of them are repeated customers.

“The Outstanding & Unique Design” transforms UD TOWN into an open-air shopping mall surrounded by greenery landscape in which visitors will experience the balance mixture of nature and leisure.

Parking area is more than adequate with direct access to the preferred shops will bring about shoppers’ more enjoyable for their new leisure experience.

Ban Chiang

Discovered in 1966, the site attracted enormous publicity due to its attractive red painted pottery. Villagers had uncovered some of the pottery in prior years without insight into its age or historical importance. In August 1966 Steve Young, an anthropology and government student at Harvard College, was living in the village conducting interviews for his senior honors thesis. Young, a speaker of Thai, was familiar with the work of William Solheim and his theory of possible ancient origins of civilization in Southeast Asia. One day while walking down a path in Ban Chiang with his assistant, an art teacher in the village school, Young tripped over a root of a Kapok tree and fell on his face in the dirt path. Under him were the exposed tops of pottery jars of small and medium sizes. Young recognized that the firing techniques used to make the pots were very rudimentary but that the designs applied to the surface of the vessels were unique and wonderful. He took samples of pots to Princess Phanthip Chumbote who had the private museum of Suan Pakkad in Bangkok and to Chin Yu Di of the Thai Government’s Fine Arts Department[1] Later, Elisabeth Lyons, an art historian on the staff of the Ford Foundation, sent sherds from Ban Chiang to the University of Pennsylvania for dating.
During the first formal scientific excavation in 1967, several skeletons, together with bronze grave gifts, were unearthed. Rice fragments have also been found, leading to the belief that the Bronze Age settlers were probably farmers. The site’s oldest graves do not include bronze artifacts and are therefore from a Neolithic culture; the most recent graves date to the Iron Age.
The first datings of the artifacts using the thermoluminescence technique resulted in a range from 4420 BCE to 3400 BC, which would have made the site the earliest Bronze Age culture in the world. However, with the 1974/75 excavation, sufficient material became available for radiocarbon dating, which resulted in more recent dates—the earliest grave was about 2100 BC, the latest about 200 AD. Bronze making began circa 2000 BC, as evidenced by crucibles and bronze fragments.[2] Bronze objects include bracelets, rings, anklets, wires and rods, spearheads, axes and adzes, hooks, blades, and little bells. However, the date of 2100 BC was obtained by Joyce White on the basis of six AMS radiocarbon dating crushed potsherds containing rice chaff temper and one on the basis of rice phytoliths. The potsherds came from mortuary offerings. This method of dating is now known to be unreliable, because the clay from which the pots were made might well itself contain old carbon. Specialists in radiocarbon dating now encourage that the method is not employed. A new dating initiative for this site has now been undertaken by Professor Thomas Higham of the AMS dating laboratory at Oxford University, in conjunction with Professor Charles Higham of the University of Otago. This has involved dating the bones from the people who lived at Ban Chiang and the bones of animals interred with them. The resulting determinations have been analysed using the Bayesian statistic OxCal 4.0, and the results reveal that the initial settlement of Ban Chiang took place by Neolithic rice farmers in about 1500 BC, with the transition to the Bronze Age in about 1000 BC. These dates are a mirror image of the results from the 76 determinations obtained from a second and much richer Bronze Age site at Ban Non Wat. The mortuary offerings placed with the dead at Ban Chiang during the Neolithic and Bronze Ages were in fact, few and poor.
The site made headlines in January 2008 when thousands of artifacts from the Ban Chiang cultural tradition and other prehistoric traditions of Thailand were found to illegally be in several California museums and other locations. The plot involved smuggling the items into the country and then donating them to the museums in order to claim large tax write offs. There were said to be more items in the museums than at the site itself. This was brought to light during high profile raids conducted by the police after a National Park Service agent had posed under cover as a private collector. If the US government wins its case, which is likely to take several years of litigation, the artifacts are to be returned to Thailand.