Today we went to see the first of our planned Khmer ruins, there are several on the Khmer Highway that went from Angkor in Cambodia, through Thailand and in to Lao.
There wasn’t much left here, but apparently it was a type of medical facility and Wat. There were also the remains of a tower that was never completed.
The whole structure was about 50m x 50m and was set inside a 200m x 200m square compound,.
After our short visit here, we continued on to “Bang Saen II and Hat Chom Thong. As part of the lake created by the Ubolratana Dam, the beaches are quite picturesque particularly when the sun sets behind the mountain ranges. There are various water sports available such as water bicycle, banana boat. Visitors can enjoy fish a menu of freshly caught from the lake. During the holidays, the beaches are always quite lively.” (Taken from website I read)
30000 people had to be relocated after the dam was built and the water catchment is huge, you couldn’t see to the other side of the lake. The water is used for drinking and hydroelectricity.
It sounded lovely, but when we first got there, there was nothing. As we stood looking at the water buffalo. I could see another section about 1km away that looked interesting.
I asked our driver what that area was and he said it was floating restaurants with swimming enclosures. This is what I thought I had told him to take us to, another near disaster due to language problems.
We were then taken to a lovely floating restaurant, sitting amongst 20 or so others. You had lots of people outside each restaurant trying to entice us to park in their area. Our driver Non ignored them all and went to the end one. I asked him why he picked this one and he told me that this is where he takes his family??????
Everyone was sitting on the floor in their little section, we were taken to a nice booth right on the water. None of us could sit on the floor like everyone else so they got us some chairs. We were the only Europeans there and hence caused a lot of interest.
We ordered a fish dish, prawn dish, squid dish and chicken wings (for Rosie). It was really good.
Everyone was wearing life jackets to go swimming, the kids were sliding down the slide (just behind Rosie in bottom photo). People were having banana boat rides and there were big party boats going by with people having lunch on them as well.
Neil and Bruce decided they would go swimming and we were the only ones who didn’t wear life vests. We looked very elegant in the fresh water and thoroughly enjoyed it. Unfortunately we didn’t look very elegant getting out of the water.
At least the locals found us to be very entertaining.
The night before we found a very interesting restaurant:
Again, we were the only non-Thai’s in there. They didn’t serve beers so Bruce went to the 7-11 next door and bought 4 beers. We had four main meals with lots of rice. The total cost, including beers, was about $20. We will be back.
