Ubon Ratchathani Guide

Ubon Ratchathani Candle Festival: The City's Biggest Week Ubon Ratchathani is best known for a single week each year, when the whole city turns to wax. The Ubon Candle Festival, held around the Buddhist Lent holiday of Asalha Puja, is Thailand's most famous candle procession: enormous carved candles, some as long as a lorry and as tall as a house, paraded through the city in a festival of music, dance, food and merit-making. If you can time one trip to Ubon, time it for this. Why Candles? The festival comes from Buddhist Lent, the three-month rainy-season retreat when monks stay in their temples and laypeople offer candles so the temples have light. Ubon turned that offering into art. The city's temples began competing on craftsmanship, and the candles grew from practical offerings into towering carved scenes from Buddhist legend and Thai life, paraded to the temples. The modern festival, centred on Thung Si Muang park and the streets around it, is the result: part relig...

Ubon Ratchathani is famous for its candle festival, its river rock formations and its ancient cliff paintings. But the temple that most surprises first-time visitors is in Sirindhorn district, in the far east of the province, near the Lao border. Wat Sirindhorn Wararam, also known as Wat Phu Prao, is a modern temple on a hill, and by day it looks calm and graceful. By night, it changes completely: the great Tree of Life mural on the back of the ordination hall glows green in the dark, and the whole temple seems to light up from within. จังหวัดอุบลราชธานีมีชื่อเสียงเรื่องงานแห่เทียน แก่งหินสามพันโบก และภาพเขียนสีผาแต้ม แต่ วัดที่สร้างความประทับใจให้ผู้มาเยือนครั้งแรกมากที่สุดแห่งหนึ่งอยู่ในอำเภอสิรินธร ทางทิศตะวันออกสุดของจังหวัด ใกล้ชายแดนลาว วัดสิรินธรวราราม หรือวัดภูพร้าว เป็นวัดสมัยใหม่บนเนินเขา กลางวันดูสงบและงดงาม แต่พอตกกลางคืน ภาพจิตรกรรมต้นไม้แห่งชีวิตที่ด้านหลังพระอุโบสถจะเรืองแสงสีเขียวในความมืด ทำให้วัดทั้งวัดดูสว่างไสวจากภายใน Wat Sirindhorn Wararam by day: the Tree of Life...

Sam Phan Bok: The Mekong's Rock Canyon at Low Water For half of every year, this place does not exist. Sam Phan Bok is a huge sandstone reef in the Mekong River, in Pho Sai district, Ubon Ratchathani province, and it only appears when the river drops in the dry season. When it does, it reveals a landscape that looks borrowed from another planet — thousands of water-carved potholes, rock arches and pools spread across the riverbed, with Laos on the far bank. It is Ubon's strangest natural wonder, and timing is everything. What You're Looking At Over centuries, the Mekong's rising and rushing wet-season flow has drilled, ground and polished the sandstone reef into fantastic shapes. Its name counts the holes at roughly 3,000, and whatever the true number, you will never see them all. Locals have nicknamed the famous shapes, and guides will point them out: Mickey Mouse hole — a pothole whose outline every Thai visitor must photograph. Photo: Charin ninsu, CC BY 3.0, ...

Three thousand years before anyone built a temple in Thailand, someone stood on a cliff above the Mekong and painted. At Pha Taem National Park, the red-ochre paintings they left behind — more than 300 figures stretched along 180 metres of sandstone — are still there, watching the same river. It is the oldest art in Thailand, and it is also one of the most beautiful day trips in Isan: a cliff walk above the Mekong, mushroom-shaped rocks, and the first sunrise in the country. Photo: Henry Flower, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons The Paintings: 3,000 Years of Red Ochre The paintings at Pha Taem are 3,000 to 4,000 years old, painted in red ochre on the face of a sandstone cliff above the Mekong. There are four groups, and the longest runs 180 metres with more than 300 images: human figures with their arms raised, animals, hands pressed flat against the rock, and — the most famous of all — a giant Mekong catfish, drawn life-size and longer than a man. Nobody knows exactly who painted...

Ubon is the end of the line — literally: the Northeastern railway terminates here — but it is also one of the best-connected cities in Isan, with its own airport and direct flights from Bangkok. The transport quirk to remember is that the train station is across the Mun River in Warin Chamrap. Times and fares below are typical; verify current schedules before travelling. By Air Ubon Ratchathani Airport (UBP) sits just north of the city — one of the closest-in airports in Thailand, about 10 minutes from the old town. Budget and full-service carriers have long run Bangkok services (from both Don Mueang and Suvarnabhumi at various times) with a flight time of about one hour. Typical fares: from around ฿700 booked well ahead, rising to ฿1,500–2,500 close to departure and around festivals. Into town: taxis and Grab from arrivals; many hotels will arrange pickup. No long transfer saga — a genuine advantage over every other city in this series. Photo: Nut340, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikim...