Khon Kaen

Table of Contents:

Introduction

Sinxay

Stuff to Do

Stuff to Do Outside the City

Food

Cinema

Recommended soundtrack: สัญญารักที่ขอนแก่น / Sanya rak thi Khon Kaen (Love Promise in Khon Kaen) by Thorngmai Mali

Introduction

I spent one month in Khon Kaen in August 2023. During this time I also did day trips to Udon Thani and Nong Khai, which I wrote about in a separate post.

For more photos and some video from my Khon Kaen trip, see my wife’s Instagram reel and highlights.

We came to Khon Kaen from Bangkok by train (train #75, which left Bangkok at 08:45am and arrived in Khon Kaen at 3:30pm). It was a really gorgeous train ride, though we regretted not going for an air conditioned compartment, as we were covered in dust by the end of the ride. There’s also a sleeper train but the timings were inconvenient. We went back to Bangkok by flight, from Khon Kaen’s small but nice airport with a surprisingly good selection of local F&B offerings. A high speed railway from Bangkok to Khon Kaen is scheduled to open in 2027, as part of a larger line that will run through Laos and to China.

Khon Kaen is kind of a hard place to write about because we had an amazing, magical month there, but objectively it isn’t that exciting of a place. If you’re a tourist on a two week Thailand trip, you probably shouldn’t bother going here. There are no major tourist attractions and not much that is so significant and noteworthy. If you’re looking to go to smallish, fairly quiet non-beach places, I’d sooner recommend Lampang or Chiang Rai, which are more beautiful and have more interesting things to do. But nonetheless, Khon Kaen was great! Its uninterestingness means you don’t have to do anything and get to just enjoy life in Thailand. I recommend going to some of Thailand’s relatively boring places where no tourists go. Even better if you have a whole month to spare. 

With that said, there’s still a good amount to do and see and eat, and Khon Kaen would still make a great trip for a few days, or more, and there are a lot of other interesting, if “minor,” things to do in the region.

I ended up in Khon Kaen kind of randomly. My first two month Thailand trip primarily consisted of around a month each in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, and for my second two-month trip I knew I wanted to do another month in Bangkok and then go somewhere more offbeat, perhaps in Isan, Thailand’s northeast province. 

The main reason I wanted to go to Isan (also frequently spelled “Isaan” or “Issan” and sometimes “E-san” or “E-sarn” and etc, and like most names in Thailand it derives from Sanskrit*) was because I became obsessed with Thai music and found out that Isan artists were major players in the luk thung music that I loved, and they contributed to the genre’s development by bringing in Isan musical styles and lyrical content (don’t miss my favorite song of all time, Sao Isan Ro Rak, which translates to Isan Girl Waiting for Love, a search term that will also give you many unfortunate Reddit threads). 

*(To ensure a safe trip, I recommend making an offering to the Hindu god Ishana.)

The Isan people (who make up around 60% of the population in Isan, see the demographics) are ethnically Lao. The region, sparsely populated for much of history, was long ago under the Khmer empire (there are some Khmer ruins in Isan) and later under the Lan Xang kingdom, which primarily encompassed what is today Isan and Laos*. Lan Xang broke apart in 1707, and what we now call Isan was split between two kingdoms, most significantly Vientiane, which was formerly the Lan Xang capital and today remains the Laos capital (right across the river from Nong Khai, where you can cross the border). Isan began to fall under the mandala of Siam, and after the failed Lao Rebellion, Siam took over Vientiane’s territory while the other Lao kingdoms became vassal states. Many people (estimates range between the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands) from Laos (or to be more accurate, the former Lao kingdoms) were forcibly relocated into Siam’s territory, and many of them settled in Isan, making up a good chunk of the population. After the 1893 Franco-Siamese crisis, France took the territory across the Mekong and Siam kept Isan. 

*(The Mekong river acts as a natural but loose border between Laos and Thailand, and a long running series of mountain ranges are a natural border between Isan and the rest of Thailand, and with Cambodia. Geographically, Isan/Northeast Thailand is basically the Khorat Plateau, between the Mekong and the mountain ranges.)

The region is considered to be economically backwards compared to the rest of Thailand, containing around one-third of the country’s population but contributing only around 10% of the GDP. Though poverty has greatly declined in the region, it was very poor until recent decades, and people from Isan have migrated in large numbers to Bangkok*. Consequently, Isan has had a major impact on Thailand’s popular culture, cuisine (larb and som tam are two prominent examples, as is a lot of street food that as a vegetarian I’m pretty cut off from), and politics (not to mention the romantic lives of western retirees**). I’ve seen various sources compare them to African Americans with regards to the impact they’ve had on the broader culture as well as the hardships and discrimination they’ve faced. Though Thaification has integrated Isan-Lao people into the broader Thai culture (how successfully and at what cost depends on who you ask), there’s still a distinct culture there that I hoped to learn more about. I honestly didn’t succeed very well in that goal***, but I still had an excellent time.

*(The census doesn’t track ethnolinguistic origins, but some estimates put Isan people at around a quarter of Bangkok’s population, making up much of the working class, though in recent years migrants from neighboring countries have taken that role more and more. The Isan population is around one-third of Thailand’s total population, so it’s not that noteworthy for the capital to have such a large Isan population, but what I find significant is that most of the Isan to Bangkok migration was post 1960s. Isan laborers have also gone abroad in large numbers. To give just a few examples, they are a major part of Israel’s agricultural sector and they pick the majority of the berries in Finland and Sweden.)

**(I almost deleted that line because it seemed like a cheap joke, but it’s a significant enough phenomenon to be worth mentioning. I’m not sure how much Isan differs from the rest of the country in that regard, but the stereotype persists. From wikipedia: “A Khon Kaen University study (2014) found that marriages with foreigners by Thai northeastern women boosted the gross domestic product of the northeast by 8.67 billion baht (2014: €211 million or US$270 million).” For more on the topic, Love, Money and Obligation: Transnational Marriage in a Northeastern Thai Village by Patcharin Lapanun sounds like a good book, here’s one positive review. There’s a fun looking Thai film, from the well regarded filmmaker Wisit Sasanatieng in the Isan dialect which is basically just the Lao language, about a (younger) white guy who marries into an Isan family and gets caught up in a murder mystery. And an academic paper: “The article considers in particular the effects of an influx of farang men on the traditional smallholder economy of the Isan region and the ways in which their presence not only transforms that economy and society but also supports its persistence.”)

***(I did learn a lot, but for the most part, urban Khon Kaen isn’t that different from your typical urban area in Thailand. It’s pretty modern, and Thai-Chinese, though there is some regional identity, see the Sinxay section below. Also, as a vegetarian I can’t really eat at most of the Isan restaurants. I would have liked to experience rural Isan more, but that will have to wait for another trip when we have a car, or someone to show us around. The closest to the quintessential rural Isan life I got was looking out the window on the train, watching men out in the rice fields herding water buffaloes. I really love water buffaloes, they make my heart flutter. I also should have talked to more people. I’m not that talkative with strangers, and most people didn’t speak very good English. Anyway, if anyone wants to invite me to a village in Isan, or anywhere for that matter, please do!)

Isan gets little tourism compared to the rest of the country, but there’s certainly plenty of potential for travelers. Here is a luxury culture oriented itinerary in the region, with the last two days centered around Khon Kaen, though it doesn’t spend time in any time in the city.

Isan has four major cities: Nakhon Ratchasima (aka Korat, the “gateway” to the region as the southwestern-most northeast city), Ubon Ratchathani, Udon Thani, and Khon Kaen. Each has around half a million people, going by the larger urban area (I saw wildly different numbers in different places, whatever, I’m sticking to that claim). I hadn’t heard of any of them before this trip, and I still rarely hear anything about them. I’m not sure I know anyone who has traveled to any of them. I looked very briefly into all of them and was confused which, if any, would be remotely suitable for a long stay. (In retrospect, I bet all of them are great, though I’m glad I went with Khon Kaen!). 

I picked Khon Kaen sort of impulsively. I saw an interesting looking restaurant there (a fancy place called Kaen) and realized that James Leonard Mitchell, who wrote a book about Thai music that I bought, teaches at the university there. I also found a decent looking airbnb in a cute home* in a quiet looking residential neighborhood that had a few nice cafes within walking distance (essential to sell my wife on the idea), which was different from the apartment tower airbnbs I saw in the other cities. We booked it pretty quickly without thinking too much about it, and honestly in the weeks before the trip we kept wondering if it was a stupid idea to go to a place that nobody goes to which we knew nothing about. We really tried to make the most of our final days in Bangkok before going to Khon Kaen as we thought there might be nothing at all interesting to do for the next month of our lives.

*(I don’t usually share my airbnbs, because they’re usually unremarkable and interchangeable, but I liked being in a quiet residential neighborhood and our host was really cute and sweet. Several times a week she’d drop off fruits or veggies or kanom for us, and she took us to the market with her the one time we bothered waking up at 6am. Not a fancy place or anything, but clean and comfortable and recommended if it suits your needs! Great for a one month stay. Link: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/52748592/)

Thankfully, we quickly fell in love with Khon Kaen. It was just a really nice, relaxed, pleasant, and charming place to live. It was more developed and modern than I expected. Before coming here, I thought of Thailand as being kind of like India, where the major cities (in the case of Thailand, that’d be Bangkok and Chiang Mai) are modern and have a lot of fancy stuff and then the rest of the country is either a tourist trap or the boondocks. But Thailand’s many non-touristy medium-sized cities are mostly nice and modern and are great places to live.

I wish I could tell you more about Khon Kaen’s unique and interesting culture and the fascinating history and heritage. But it’s not that kind of place. We mostly just went to work from fancy cafes. This was fun. We also went to the fancy mall and a bunch of fancy cafes and a few fancy art galleries and some fancy restaurants and a couple fancy cocktail bars and a fancy baking supplies superstore. I feel embarrassed and stupid writing that sentence. But doing these things in a small provincial region in Thailand where I saw more water buffaloes than white people was kind of awesome. 

Because there was “nothing to do,” it kind of gave me the freedom to do a lot of fun things I may not have found or made the time for otherwise. A Khon Kaen highlight is walking around the lake at sunset, which I did multiple times. I rarely prioritize such things. And I still did a lot of Thai stuff. We went to some very fun temples, including my first “hell garden”, which sparked off an obsession and led me to buy a book about the topic (serendipitous encounters that spark off obsessions that lead me to buy books on random topics, now that’s travel!). I went to see a Thai movie in theaters every weekend (real travel pro stuff here). I listened to dozens of hours of Luk Thung music while reading a book about it. I had an insanely good homemade farm to table Isan feast (link, one of the most special meals I’ve ever had, and of course we had plenty of other great food as well). I learned about Sinxay (see below). 

Some of what we loved was specific to Khon Kaen, while some of this could have been in any similarly sized city in Thailand. A lot of the joy of our month in Khon Kaen was the discovery of regular, non-touristy, medium-sized city Thailand. But I do think Khon Kaen had a great balance of various elements, and we may not have had as great of a time elsewhere. It does seem more happening and more artistic* than most of the other mid sized cities (I credit this partly to the university). There’s a good mix of modernity with the charms of small town life**. It had the comforts and amenities I want from a place I’m living in rather than just visiting, but there were virtually no other outsiders there and I got to live the local life. It’s semi-walkable in parts, and it’s small enough that I never spent more than ten minutes in a car***. I wouldn’t say it’s a beautiful city, but there’s plenty of greenery around, and a ten minute drive could take us from the city center to what feels like remote farmland. 

*(That reminds me, the iconic Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul grew up, went to school, and shot some of his films here! More on him in the cinema section.)

**(For example, we went to a specialty coffee fair at a convention center, and we found out about it a few days before from a mini truck that drove around with a speaker and poster announcing the event.)

***(We got around by Grab. I’m convinced everything was ten minutes away. Sometimes on the way to something ten minutes away, we’d make a stop that was halfway, and each portion of the trip would still be ten minutes. This was a consistent phenomenon and I never figured it out. Interestingly, a light rail system is in the works. This would be Thailand’s first outside of Bangkok.)

Oh, and dinosaurs.

Also, people around here were super nice. Thai people are typically fairly shy and hands off, and they see so many tourists they’re jaded by us, but in Khon Kaen many people seemed friendlier and more curious. We got a lot of questions about how we ended up in Khon Kaen, because it’s so obviously not a place for tourists to bother with. The owner of a well known Chinese candy store asked us how we found out about his place and said, “I saw you guys crossing the road to come and I thought you were lost and came to ask for help.” Experiences like this were fairly common.

I’m not sure how good of a job I’m doing selling it, but I found a travel blogger who wrote about doing a long stay in Udon Thani and described it as one of his favorite places in the world, without really describing what makes it so great. I totally get it, because that’s how I felt in Khon Kaen (and as I wrote in my Udon Thani post, I may have felt that way if I spent a month there instead of in Khon Kaen). I think whether or not you’d feel the same way depends on if you find Thailand to be uniquely fun and happy and charming, as I do, and if you like the modern comforts and small town charm mix that places like Khon Kaen have to offer.

Sinxay

One of the highlights of Khon Kaen was learning about Sinxay. This classic Lao epic is popular in the Khon Kaen region and its characters have become mascots of sorts for the city. I first thought Sinxay was a regional variant of the Ramayana/Ramakien, as both are about a princess who gets kidnapped by a demon and the subsequent quest by a prince to rescue her. Once I took a closer look, I realized that there are many major differences and that Sinxay is its own story, and it maybe has as much in common with the Ramayana as it does with Super Mario. But an even closer look revealed direct scenes in common with the Ramayana. So there is some common thread here.

My initial encounter with the story was through the street lamps which feature the bow wielding hero Sinxay, his conch shell twin brother Sangthong, and their half elephant half lion half brother Siho. Siho statues also guard the city pillar. 

In the city’s most prominent temple, Wat Nong Wang, there are modern murals depicting Sinxay (more info in my temple section later), and there are gorgeous early 20th century murals depicting the story in some temples outside the city (the major ones are Wat Chaisi and Wat Sanuan Wari, see the “Stuff to Do Outside the City” section later), done in the hup taem style which is unique to the region. Within Khon Kaen, there’s a university professor who has collected Sinxay artwork and turned it into a museum at his house (more info later in the museum section, he also serves coffee to guests, because it’s Thailand, where anything that can be turned into a coffee shop will be turned into a coffee shop). I also saw some Sinxay street art. [see sept 6 photo]

I highly recommend making Sinxay a big part of your Khon Kaen trip. I regret that I didn’t get more into it when I was there, as I missed the major temples. 

The best starting point to learn about Sinxay is Wikipedia, where there is a plot summary and plenty of background information and artwork. 

If you want to go all out, try to get the book Sinxay: Renaissance of a Lao-Thai Epic Hero by Baythong Sayouvin Whittlesey and Peter Whittlesey, who are also responsible for the Wikipedia page. It’s unfortunately not an easy book to find, as it is unavailable on all of the online bookstores I checked, though an e-book version is in the works. I tracked it down by emailing Peter at peterlaos@hotmail.com, and he gave me permission to share his email for anyone who wants to get the book. Peter hopes to get it back up on Amazon, too, so give it a search. Here’s the current page, though this may change. If I were in charge of tourism and cultural promotion in Isan and Laos, I would have it featured on every bookshelf.

It’s worth the effort to get the book, which consists of an accessible retelling of the story, background information, and tons of great pictures, including original artwork and temple art. For visitors to Khon Kaen, it has useful guides to the temples in the area. Though I didn’t get a chance to read the whole book before publishing this (I thought I’ll save a full read for a future visit to Isan or Laos), I read enough of it that I can enthusiastically recommend it.

The same team put together an extensive Sinxay website, which is unfortunately defunct, though its ghost lives on via Internet Archive. Worth browsing through what you can, and also worth checking the actual URL to see if it’s back online. The website has a longer summary than what’s on wikipedia.

I gave Sinxay its own section because I really wanted to highlight it for several reasons. For starters, it’s a symbol of Khon Kaen as an Isan city. I had read in various sources that Isan identity was suppressed in the Thaification process, often in regards to marginalizing the Lao language in favor of the Thai language, and the Sinxay book gives two other examples: Sinxay murals were covered in plaster, and monks were discouraged from chanting Sinxay verses. These suppression efforts were relaxed in the 1980s, and in 2005 Sinxay was chosen as a symbol of the city. The history is unfortunate, but Sinxay’s revival adds some depth and character to the city.

Also, Sinxay is a good representation of what I liked about Khon Kaen. There’s the surface charms (of the street lights, and otherwise), a rich culture for those who wish to explore further, a well educated and creative population, and some more cool places to visit if you possess a car and some curiosity.

By the way, I love this album Musiques et Chants du Laos: Luang Prabang & Vientiane (Spotify / Youtube) by Groupe Sinxay, whoever they are, amongst others.

Stuff to Do

Like much of Thailand, the main thing to do in Khon Kaen is eat, so you can see the food section below, where I’ll also list some of the fun cafes that we went to, and the cocktail bars (I feel obligated to disclose that I’m against alcohol and the cocktail bars are my wife’s gig). As for non-culinary activities, there’s a mix of museums, art galleries, markets, temples, the movie theater and mall, and the lake to walk around at sunset. I realize that doesn’t make Khon Kaen sound so exciting, and that’s because it isn’t. But I assure you it is still a lot of fun! 

There are more interesting things outside of the city that could make for a good day/half day trip, mostly old temples with Sinxay murals, and a national park. I have a “Stuff to Do Outside the City” section below this.

My main travel activity is “walk around interesting urban areas,” and though I enjoyed roaming around the central part of Khon Kaen (and some parts near the university, though it’s mainly too spread out), I don’t rank that as a highlight. There’s a decent amount of shops and cafes and restaurants to check out, and mornings are lively with markets and school kids, but otherwise it was generally pretty quiet, and it’s not architecturally interesting. I recommend getting around on foot when you can, but I don’t have any walks for the sake of walking, other than around the lake at sunset. 

There’s a small street with a bunch of hotels and bars where old white guys hang out. I avoided that area. Everywhere else was good. 

There are a good amount of art, music, and food related events in Khon Kaen, and other random happenings. Here’s an Instagram account that updates about what’s going on. Worth checking out. 

The Lake

The Bueng Kaen Nakhon Reservoir (what I’ve just been calling “the lake”) is really lovely for an evening walk (and probably nice in the morning as well), and there’s enough to do nearby that you can make a half day out of it. I went down to this area at least once a week. There’s a night market there, a few museums/galleries (more info below, but I strongly recommend Manifesto by MAIELIE, and there’s also the Khon Kaen City Museum, Thai-Chinese Cultural Center, and Mamafaka Gallery), several nice cafes (just look on google maps), and some temples (I enjoyed visiting the pyramidal Wat Nong Wang, more on that later). On Friday afternoons is the Khon Kaen Green Market, a great organic farmer’s market which is more my thing than the frequently junkfoodish night markets. 

Museums and Art Galleries

The city has a number of museums and art galleries. I made it to a handful but there were a few I didn’t get to. Some were great and highly recommended, some were alright.

For me the highlight was undoubtedly the Sinxay Heritage House, which was one of my favorite Khon Kaen experiences. I already talked about the Sinxay epic and its prominence in the region (and I’ll discuss some of the temple murals further down). At this museum, if you can call it that, a university professor collects a wide range of Sinxay art and memorabilia out in his home in a beautiful village area, a short drive yet a world away from the city. The founder is also a coffee aficionado and serves a range of coffees to his guests, and he doesn’t charge for it! (We were happy to donate.) Though it’s a small space, we spent around 90 minutes there.

This is an excellent tribute to Isan’s cultural heritage, and as a lover of folklore and stories it was a special experience for me. It was also great meeting the founder, who was very sweet and enthusiastic even though he didn’t speak much English. He has a friend there to help out and translate. She was also super nice, and they both seemed really happy to have us there.

The hours are listed on google, but I recall that not being entirely accurate, and I wouldn’t go without reaching out to them. We messaged on facebook. The place was a bit hard to find, and our Grab got lost. 

Before you go, definitely familiarize yourself with the story. The wikipedia entry has a plot summary, and here’s a longer one.

After that, I also really enjoyed the two art galleries we went to: Manifesto by MAIELIE (an outpost of Chiang Mai’s excellent MAIIAM), which is conveniently right by the lake, and the Art and Culture University Museum, which is by the convention center, the weekend nighttime Flea Market KKU, and the Natural History Museum (I have no memory of going to the natural history museum, but there’s a picture of me with a giant stuffed animal spider, so I guess it was good). Both galleries are great and recommended! 

Also near the lake is the small Mamafaka Gallery, dedicated to a Thai artist who died very young. If I recall correctly, it’s set up at his parents’ home and I think it was his dad who greeted us. His art style is really fun and I found the experience touching. 

There’s also an art gallery at the Ton Tann night market, but it was closed when we were there as they were changing exhibits.

Along these lines, I also recommend checking out TCDC (Thailand Creative & Design Center) Khon Kaen, up near the university. They sometimes have art and design exhibits, though none were on when I was there. Still, the architecture is cool, and they have a library and study space that you can get into with a guest pass. It was mostly students there working and studying. It was nice to see something like this in Khon Kaen. The area has a lot of cafes catering to students, we stopped by the cute little Normal3rd Coffee KKU.

And if you like arts and crafts kind of stuff, definitely check out Columbo Craft Village, near the university. A cute place with lots of little shops and cafes. And on the map next to it I spotted a new little art gallery called Khontemporary. We worked from a nice cafe across from here called Lecithin. It was fun to drive through the campus and see the area, which is very green and feels very different from the city which is only like ten minutes away. Also around here is the The Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts Gallery, though I didn’t go.

The Khon Kaen Art Wall is cute too. It’s at The Wall, a nice little area with a bunch of cafes and eateries that (as I’ve gathered from a Thai article) was repurposed from a pharmaceutical and printing press manufacturing area in the city. There’s a small museum where they’ve recreated an old pharmacy, and Vector Coffee has a small printing press museum setup. There’s also a tiny art gallery there. 

I unfortunately never made it to some of the cafes that have small art spaces in them (Coffee Der La, Ready for the Weekend), though I did go to the nice Pixel Bar & Gallery (sadly now closed).

For more traditional museums, the Khon Kaen National Museum is probably the highlight. Recommended if you want to see a bunch of old artifacts found around here. Great sculpture works. Some nice chicken shaped pots and rabbit shaped coconut scrapers. Tim’s Thailand has a gallery of some Khmer sculptures from the museum. 

I didn’t go to the Khon Kaen City Museum near the lake. I regretted not going, though from the photos it doesn’t look that good. With that said, Thailand’s small city museums are generally quite good (I really liked them in Lampang, Trat, and Udon Thani, for example, though those all seem newer and better put together than this). From the Travelfish writeup: “Though it lacks the solid collection of artefacts found at the National Museum, you’ll probably learn more here.” Good to know. I kinda feel bad I learned so little about Khon Kaen. I thought maybe there was nothing to learn.

That’s right by the Thai-Chinese Cultural Center, which looks like it could be worth checking out, but I’m certain it won’t be as good as the excellent one in Udon Thani. 

There’s also the surprisingly nice looking Treasury Department museum which I hadn’t heard of until I walked by it on my second to last day in town and didn’t have time to visit. Despite good reviews, it’s poorly advertised and doesn’t even come up when you type museums into google maps!

Temples

Temples are the next major thing I did in Khon Kaen, and they were a highlight.

The most prominent temple in town is the pyramid-shaped Wat Nong Wang, which is right by the lake and makes for a nice city landmark. Though there’s been a temple here for centuries, everything you’ll see here is modern. It’s not my favorite of the temples I’ll mention, but it was still really fun to visit, mainly because of the murals that tell some of the local folklore. The meaning of the murals will be lost on most visitors, but there are descriptions for most of them over at Tim’s Thailand. If the murals don’t interest you, the temple isn’t that exciting.

The most noteworthy of the murals are the Sinxay ones. Tim doesn’t have a guide for these, but you can translate the Thai text on his wife Suttawan’s website Isan Insight. I explained what Sinxay is earlier, and if you don’t know the story I recommend the short summary on wikipedia, or the longer one on the Sinxay website. These aren’t as beautiful as the older murals at the other temples, but I still find them charming and enjoyed going through the story at the temple. 

I also greatly enjoyed murals depicting another Lao classic, the story of the Nang Phom Hom, aka The Fragrant-Haired Lady, and Tim has both a short and long summary of it. I recommend reading the story while going through the murals. I hadn’t heard of this story before, but as Tim notes, ‘The story is well known. It has been shown on TV, told in books, and is a popular production for theater groups, especially mor lam musical troupes. And, of course, there’s a line of “Nang Phom Hom” hair care products.’ I didn’t find any full translations or retellings of the story, but I did find a French version, La Femme Aux Cheveux Perfumes! 

And here’s Tim’s guide for the murals that tell you how to behave properly, and the murals that tell Khon Kaen’s history, plus the murals that showcase Isan culture including the merit making practices, not to mention the murals of Isan proverbs, in addition to the murals about the life of the temple’s former abbot, as well as the doorway carvings depicting Buddha’s life story and a Jataka story, on top of the carvings depicting the [head explodes, anyway here’s Tim’s guide to the whole temple]. Invaluable work, thank you, Tim! 

Right by this temple is another temple, Wat That. Not that exciting or different from the typical Thai temple, I thought, but there were pretty murals inside. Look for the dinosaurs. Here’s Tim’s writeup.

Even better than the two central temples were two kind of odd, offbeat modern temples a short drive outside of town, highly recommended as long as you have a sense of wonder and a taste for kitsch. Only ten or so minutes away, but they feel like an adventure. 

My favorite was probably the Wat Thung Setthi, which has beautiful architecture that I’d describe as Thai-Buddhist Neo-Baroque. The highlight for me wasn’t the main temple, though, but was the incredible hell garden behind it. Really extraordinary, disturbing vision of the underworld. Truly invoked terror in me and made me want to behave more morally. It was my first hell garden and these are my favorite things in the world. Demented yet magical.

I also loved the massive, epic Hindu temple complex / theme park Shiva Mahatap Tewalai. How much you like this may depend on how interested you are in seeing an alternate universe reinterpretation of Indian culture and aesthetics. My wife liked this temple less than I did, I’m not sure if that’s because she’s more Indian than me or less Indian than me. There’s also a hell area here. The whole thing was bananas. If you take a Grab out here, I recommend asking your driver to wait for you as it’s nearly impossible to get a ride back.

There are of course a million other temples around here and probably some are just as good. The City Pillar is fun to check out as well, full of quirky touches, including the Sinxay character Siho as one of the shrine guards. I deeply regret not visiting some of the older temples further outside of the city, with their stunning looking Sinxay murals (more info in the “Stuff to do Outside the City” section).

Markets

Of course going to markets is one of the top things to do wherever you are in Thailand, whether you plan on buying anything or not. 

We bought a lot of our produce from small neighborhood markets, but we stocked up a few times at the big Khon Kaen Talat Rod Fai (Railway Market). Fun place. For some reason we never properly visited the big municipal market in the center of town, which we would periodically walk into as it was dying in the late afternoon. There are a ton of markets in a row around here, with food stalls as well. You should go.

There are a few night markets that are fun to visit and could be good for dinner, though as a vegetarian I mainly just got fruit, juice, and desserts from them. The Saturday night Khon Kaen Walking Street was the best of them. Highly recommended. Big with a good range of interesting things. We got a lot of good fruit and got a great iced chocolate beverage from a vendor that had different single origin Thai chocolates to choose from. And live music, including some people playing local instruments for tips. I also really enjoyed the university flea market, which happens Friday through Sunday.

The large nightly Ton Tann market is a good option if you aren’t there on a weekend, with a mix of big permanent stalls and smaller vendors, clothes shopping, plus live music, an art gallery, and a number of sit down restaurants.

There’s also a smaller nightly market in the city center and one at the lake.

More my speed was the Friday late afternoon Green Market at the lake, with health foods and organic produce.

Miscellaneous

Central malls are always nice and Central Khonkaen is no exception. Nice movie theater (more detail in the cinema section later). Nice downstairs food court (I got a great mushroom salad from one of the ladies). Nice grocery store. Etc.

Fairy Plaza is the crappy old mall and I find old school Thai malls fun for some reason.

Not my thing but I heard Jutatip is nice. You can buy clothes and bags and stuff and see the natural dyeing process.

I wanted to go to Wild Dog Bookshop but never got around to it. I always enjoy checking out local book stores, and Thai ones are particularly fun.

Stuff to Do Outside the City

To start, see my post about my short trips to Udon Thani (modestly recommended) and Nong Khai (highly recommended). I would recommend these are overnight trips rather than daytrips. However there are several things to do within a 1 hour or so drive from Khon Kaen that would make good day trips. 

I also saw some day trip options from the Khon Kaen based travel company Isan Explorer, which looks good (run by Tim and Suttawan of the aforementioned Tim’s Thailand and Isan Insight): https://isanexplorer.com/daytrips/

For me, the top things to do would be visiting the temples with the beautiful old murals of Sinxay. The two big ones in the region are Wat Chaisi (about half an hour from the city) and Wat Sanuan Wari (about an hour from the city). I deeply regret not going to these. 

Wat Chaisi isn’t near or directly on the way to anything else, but it can probably be clubbed with a visit to Nam Phong National Park and one of the farm restaurants on that route. I went to Mekin farm, and there’s also Sookjailand. Further out is Nai Chan Coffee Plantation x Faffeine. I’m not sure how time consuming the national park would be and if it’s feasible to make a day trip with all of this. But the temple and a farm lunch sounds like a great outing.

Wat Sanuan Wari conveniently has some nice looking places to visit nearby. The Michelin guide recommends going to the Kaeng Lawa wetland, then going to Baan Lang Wat Coffee, and then lunch at So Jeng. 

I found a website with good information on these and other temples in the area: https://www.orientalarchitecture.com/cid/184/thailand/khon-kaen

There are more day trip opportunities but these were the major things I wanted to do. I also thought about checking out some more small towns nearby, such as Roi Et.

Also, dinosaurs.

Food

I had some really great food in Khon Kaen, including a very special homemade Isan feast, but for the most part I’m not a great guide to the city as I’m vegetarian. Thankfully, there’s a Michelin guide. I tried going to some of the places on there but unfortunately being vegetarian in Thailand is kinda like being diabetic in a candy store (or… diabetic in Thailand, which is probably harder than being vegetarian, though Isan is probably easier than central Thailand in that regard). 

Still, I have some great recommendations for everyone of all dietary requirements, with restaurants ranging from cheap local places to high end fancy places. But check out that Michelin guide. They got a restaurant set out in the rice fields. Obviously go there. Here are their budget picks. I also often find great recommendations on Read the Cloud (gotta hit the translate button). In Khon Kaen they’ve got a writeup on a bunch of old school establishments and on an Isan/Japanese fusion place, to name just a few. Omnivores should also find valuable recommendations from Mark Wiens’ website and youtube.

I’ll start with what was undoubtedly the culinary highlight of Khon Kaen, Huen Kham Nang, the aforementioned homemade Isan feast. Then I’ll write about the great Thai-Chinese breakfast joint Baan Heng, some nice upscale places I visited (Kaen with a locally inspired tasting menu and the beautiful boutique hotel/restaurant Krua Supanniga by Khunyai Somsie), the lovely Mekin Farm outside the city, the vegetarian restaurants I frequented, a few miscellaneous places, cocktail bars, and then cafes/bakeries we visited and/or worked from.

Of course I recommend eating at and/or visiting markets too, I listed the markets in the section above.

Huen Kham Nang is one of the best meals I’ve ever had in Thailand, a gorgeous seasonal farm to table meal from Chef Kham Nang, a passionate ambassador of Isan cuisine. A one of a kind meal that is worth planning a trip around (in Michelin terms, that’s three stars!). And it astonishingly only cost 500 baht per person. (I assume it has gone up since our 2023 visit, and our vegetarian meal may have cost less than the main meals. In any case, it is worth several times what we paid.) When we went, it was at her home in a village about 20 minutes to the west of the city, but google maps now shows a location near the university. Prebooking was required, though I’m not sure if anything has changed.

The meal had a dozen or so different dishes, at least half of them unlike anything I’ve ever had before. All were delicious and interesting, going beyond typical Isan dishes that I was accustomed to (som tam, larb, etc). Some dishes had an intensely herbal taste and earthy taste, and some were surprisingly simple, highlighting the flavorful individual ingredients, most of which were homegrown or sourced from nearby villages. 

Dishes included mushrooms, bamboo shoots, lotus root, lotus petal miang kham, all sorts of local herbs and raw veggies (including ginger flower and the spiciest arugula I’ve ever had), and, my personal favorite, a dish served in a large pumpkin, with a cream made of Luk Krabok (often referred to as “Isan wild almonds”) and topped with tofu made with local sesame. That was insane. And gorgeous, as was the whole meal. I’m more of a flavor over visual kind of guy, but the pumpkin and flowers and banana leaves and cane baskets really enhance the meal!

Before this meal I had seen a quote from Chef Num at Samuay & Sons in Udon Thani (highly recommended, see that post) where he said “Isan cuisine has a lot of things in common with Japanese in the sense that we enjoy seasonal ingredients and the food doesn't have a lot of complicated or complexity in flavours. Both cuisines allow the main ingredient to shine.” I didn’t really understand that comparison when I read it, but I did after this meal, at least in the case of some dishes.

Chef Kham Nang speaks little English (and we speak no Thai), but we chatted with her through google translate. She is an excellent resource on the intricacies of Isan cuisine and culture, and despite the barrier she did a good job of explaining the meal to us, with an emphasis on how the foods are traditionally used as medicine, which is something she’s studied. She was super sweet and seemed genuinely excited to have us there, as she doesn’t get many foreigners. She told us she loves Indian food and took an ayurvedic cooking course, and that she wants to learn to cook more of it.

If I’m ever back in Khon Kaen, coming back here will be my top priority!

I was really excited to tell the world about this meal, which I had in September 2023, because to the best of my knowledge nobody had ever written about it in English before. But it turns out in October 2023 Mark Wiens put out a video showcasing her food titled “Unseen Isaan Food in Khon Kaen - Best Thai Food!” Blasted! Beat me to the punch.

It was impossible to top this meal, and I wish I weren’t largely relegated to vegetarian restaurants and could have gotten a better handle on the food scene, but we still had a lot of great food and some nice dining experiences.

One was at the great Thai-Chinese breakfast (though open all day) joint Baan Heng. It’s a cute place with a modern but old school wooden shophouse vibe, reflecting its roots as a sausage maker, founded in 1957, that doubled as a souvenir shop and eventually expanded to serving food. They still sell their sausages, apparently highly regarded across Thailand (more info here, they use fresh pork instead of leftovers), and they have a good selection of local food products for sale in their shop. 

The food menu is small but is the sort where you feel like everything is good. Portions are small and everything is inexpensive so you can try a lot of things. Signatures are hot dog looking things with their sausages and pork floss, or pan eggs with sausage. It was a bit difficult ordering as the servers don’t speak English, but the girl who runs the place speaks perfect English, so find her if you can. Despite being limited in our options we still ate very well getting some sides. Rice, bread, mushrooms, scrambled egg with preserved radish, stewed boiled egg and tofu, and salad. Great brunch! We also got Thai tea and what was one of the best orange juices I’ve ever had (homemade, no sugar).  I will definitely return on another Khon Kaen trip! And I enjoyed walking around that area, which has a number of old shops and restaurants. 

Another Khon Kaen culinary highlight was the fanciest place in town, Kaen, a high end locavore restaurant that does a mix of Thai and western inspired food, with a seasonal tasting menu. The tasting menu is pricey (1500 baht per person for 12 courses, likely to have gone up, quite affordable by global standards), but the a la carte options are pretty inexpensive for the quality. This restaurant was partly why I chose Khon Kaen. I didn’t actually know anything about the restaurant, but I had it saved on my map, and its existence was a suggestion that Khon Kaen might be cool enough to spend a month in.

The chefs here were formerly cooking at five star hotels before they decided to do something more personal. As one of them is from Khon Kaen, they chose to come back here and set up a restaurant that’s rooted in the region. Some of it is classic Thai, some of it is classic Isan, some of it more modern and/or European, but rooted in local ingredients. I think the majority of what was served came from the region around Khon Kaen, and the chefs were happy to share about the provenance of the ingredients when they brought the food to the table.

While the meal wasn’t quite as impressive as Samuay and Sons in Udon Thani, it was still a great meal (and probably would have been even better if I weren’t vegetarian, though I didn’t feel slighted). Every dish was delicious, beautifully presented, had fun creative touches, and was on the light and healthy side. My favorite dishes were the ones that leaned into the local flavors, partly for local identity reasons but also just because Thai food is yummier than everything else. Still, even the non-Thai dishes were wonderful. I loved a purple sweet potato and yellow corn soup, with the two colors making a yin-yang, and the a la nage dish with a sauce made with homemade butter from locally sourced milk.

The dessert course was simple but outstanding. Daifuku stuffed with mulberry jam and peanut butter mousse, topped with ground sesame that was pounded fresh at the table. The best PB&J I’ve ever had, and it put all other daifukus I’ve had to shame. Silky smooth and melt in your mouth.

My wife got her meal with a sato pairing, which is really cool. Sato is the rice wine from Isan that is locally beloved but is surprisingly hard to find I think mostly due to regulatory reasons. My wife loves it but rarely gets it. The pairing came with four different satos from an artisanal sato maker outside of Khon Kaen, in addition to a pineapple beer, a probiotic drink (non-alcoholic, they have homemade kombucha and tepache, they were great!), and some homemade eau de vie from local fruits. I may be against alcohol, but I approve of this pairing. My wife loved it (and at 500 baht, very reasonable for a pairing, though I’m sure the price has gone up). 

Beautiful restaurant, too, full of wood furnishings that gives it a very Isan feel. We lucked out because the night we went there was some event that hired a folk music trio to perform, which added to the experience! Having the chefs come out to deliver the food also added to the experience. They were very friendly and explained the food well, and you can tell the restaurant is a labor of love. 

Definitely recommended, and I would go back! I also hope to go to Cocoon, the new cafe from one of the chefs.

The one other fancy restaurant we went to was Krua Supanniga by Khunyai Somsie, a lovely place to visit, though as a vegetarian I honestly don’t recommend eating there (unless they’ve updated the menu since I visited). The restaurant is at the boutique hotel Supanniga Home, and this is the first property and the family home of the founder of Bangkok’s very good Supanniga Eating Room (I’ve been to a few and am a fan!), with both restaurants being centered around family recipes, including dishes from Trat where the eponymous Khunyai (grandmother) Somsie was from before moving to Khon Kaen. They have also recently added a cafe to the property.

Unfortunately, the limited vegetarian options were unremarkable. We got mushrooms, chinese kale, and a western style salad. It was all solid but kind of basic. The Bangkok restaurant had better options for us. I’ve seen some rave writeups about the restaurant, though, including from Bangkok Glutton, one of Thailand’s finest food bloggers, so if you aren’t vegetarian you should probably go. There’s even a tasting menu of signature dishes. I wonder if I can arrange a vegetarian tasting menu if I inquire ahead of time. 

Still, it was a worthwhile visit. It’s hardly 10 minutes from the Khon Kaen city center but it feels like another world. Going there during our one month stay was like taking a mini vacation within our workation. It’s a really gorgeous and green property that I enjoyed strolling around and getting a tour of. One of my favorite parts was seeing the owner’s very impressive tea collection. 

So, recommended, and even if you’re vegetarian it’s worth coming here to relax at the cafe. Also, Indians may feel a swell of nationalist pride when they discover that the table napkins are from Fabindia. 

Another lovely place to visit though not quite ideal for vegetarians is Mekin Farm, which also has a few rooms for guests to stay in. This is around 35 minutes from the city. It’s ideally visited as part of a day trip checking out other things in the area (we wanted to check out Nai Chan Coffee Plantation x Faffeine cafe, a cafe at a rubber plantation that grows its own coffee, and the Nam Phong National Park, and Wat Chaisi, but I’m terrible at planning and none of this was as close as it looked zoomed out on the map, and it was expensive to get around and I was sleepy after lunch), but if you don’t want to spend a whole day out and just want some good fresh food out in a beautiful farm setting then it’s worth a visit on its own. We came here on our first weekend in Khon Kaen, after having spent a month in Bangkok, and it was a great short getaway from city life.

Though as vegetarians we couldn’t get their Isan specials, we still ate well. We got a delicious Thai style spicy fruit salad with, amongst other things, starfruit, kiwi, and apple, and we got a good western style salad with pumpkin. We also got a Thai omelet but I find those to be oily and kinda gross. They had great drinks, too. We got an iced latte and a wonderful smoothie made with homegrown greens and herbs, and for dessert a great bua loy.

The farm itself, where they grow much of the produce, was as much the draw as the food, and it was nice to walk around, relax, and pet the pigs. I hope to come back, clubbed with a visit to some other places nearby!

Because of dietary constraints, most of the meals we ate out were at Jay (vegetarian) restaurants, and most of those were at one particular place that we went to 1-2 times a week: Tawanthong Vegetarian Food. This is one of my favorite Jay places in Thailand. It’s a large space with a typical Jay restaurant buffet setup as well as a stall from a woman who makes things fresh, a little smoothie shop, a nice selection of refrigerated beverages, and a large grocery store which has a good selection, including some good organic produce (though not everything in the store was vegetarian, when we showed them some curry pastes that had shrimp in them they didn’t seem to care). All of it is good! My favorite stuff came from the freshly prepared stall, which included a range of salads. That was excellent. But try everything. Cleaner than most J places too, which tend to be a bit grungy.

This was definitely our favorite vegetarian place but the handful of others we tried were mostly pretty good too. Tawanthong closes at 2:30pm, and a lot of things run out before then, so it’s good to have other options. These include Eddie Veget (small inexpensive place, a la carte, we got stir fried greens, mushrooms, and noodles, simple but good, currently says temporarily closed but they were open in the evening when we had gone), Kem-Kon (has more of a nice cafe vibe and has a lot of western options, not as cheap as the other places but not expensive, we got red curry and som tam lao, also says temporarily closed but we had gone for dinner), Khun Vegan (also a mix of cuisines, a bit pricier but not bad, we got some Thai dishes and western style salads, also open for dinner), and J. Lao Di Fang (more of a typical J place, inexpensive, has a buffet setup and some a la carte, quite good with some unusual dishes on offer, my favorite was the Nam Khao which I’ve never seen offered for vegetarians before. Open until 7pm but my guess is the buffet stuff is best earlier).

And some miscellaneous places:

See Na Nuan Café - A fun, very popular place near the university, with live music at night. The Michelin guide recommends the seafood, specifically the grilled snakehead fish with spicy dip. We got stir fried sunflower sprouts with tofu and a curry served in a coconut. It was good! 

Lom Kaow - Cafe & Restaurant - Isan restaurant that seemed legit and had decent vegetarian options. Got mushrooms with scrambled eggs, an herbal soup with mushrooms and pumpkin, a grilled eggplant salad with boiled eggs, and a delicious dessert of sago, black beans, and root vegetables in coconut cream.

Teaw Hua Yue - Old and renowned Chinese candy store!

Blanc Noir - Good gelato, with some fun local flavors. We got the black sesame.

Dotlimited - More of an all natural, eco-friendly food and home goods store, but they have salads and smoothies. We got a great greens smoothie.

I can rarely ever bring myself to go for non Thai food, but there were numerous Japanese and Korean places. Western cuisines were rarer but a few places looked pretty good. I wanted to go to PS Baan Italian Pizza, in a random part of town.

We went to two cocktail bars as well. One closed (Pixel), but the other, realizegallery, was great. My wife really loved whatever locally inspired cocktail she got. The owners were very nice, and the place was quiet. There were a few others my wife wanted to check out but I don’t let her drink so much.

We also worked from several cafes a week. They were really fancy. I was impressed. The coffee was almost always very good (though unlike Bangkok and Chiang Mai, the default was often to serve it with sugar, and even when we specified without sugar they would periodically screw it up). My wife made an instagram reel collecting her favorites, you can check that out, but you can also just type “cafe” into google maps and ten thousand will come up, several of which we wanted to go to but never got around to. 

If I had to highlight a few to recommend, they would be the ones that have some heritage appeal (Rak An and Vector at the Wall) and the matcha cafes (sadly Rosie closed down, but Midori Hayate was also great, and they had different single origin matcha ice creams which were awesome, though the small space means it’s not ideal for working from). For places most ideal for working, Hype and Goodbeans were standouts, and were busy with students studying. A noteworthy place we didn’t get to visit, as it hadn’t opened yet, is CoCoon, which is by one of the chefs at the great restaurant Kaen.

We bought our sourdough from From Scratch, which was generally good, and their main location near the university was good to work from.

When I was there, there were no chocolate cafes. There was one that we tried going to but they were new and had erratic hours and now I can’t find it. A quick google search turned up a new place called Reception, and Goodbeans also sold some bars made from local beans.

Cinema

I went to two multiplexes in Khon Kaen, both nice, and saw a few of the old single screens that are still standing but not operating. I’ll cover those here and will also share a bit about two filmmakers from Khon Kaen: Thailand’s most internationally renowned director, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and action pioneer Panna Rittikrai.

I saw four movies in Khon Kaen, two at the SF Cinema at the Central mall, and two at the Major cinema at Lotus’s Khonkaen Pratunam, seeing two different auditoriums in each. There are a few other Major cinemas as well. All of the films I saw were Thai, with English subtitles. Unlike in Bangkok, most of the non-Thai movies playing were dubbed into Thai. 

I don’t have much to say about the theaters but they were pretty nice. Clean. Solid picture and sound. No complaints! I may have liked the Major slightly more, but seeing a movie at the Central mall is better than seeing it at the Lotus supermarket mall.

So go for a Thai movie when you’re there, or anywhere in Thailand! A highly recommended activity.

It made me sad that the theaters were almost entirely empty every time we went, though. I’m pretty sure most of the films we saw were on weekends, too. I go to a lot of movies all around the world, often at odd hours, and I’ve never seen theaters so consistently empty. No idea how they stay in business.

No longer in business are any of the old single screens, as is typical in Thailand. I’m grateful I got to see the Prince Theater building, though. Conveniently located right off the main drag. I liked the marquee at the entrance of the lane. Here’s the writeup from the Southeast Asia Movie Theater Project. 

The website also features the Kaen Kham theater, though I’m not sure if it still stands or where it is/was. A search for Khon Kaen also turns up a few other theaters in the province, worth browsing through. One post, a compilation of images from around the country, shows a great image of the marquee of the Chalerm Rath Theater, which I can’t find any information about.

The Kaen Kham was also written about by none other than Thailand’s most iconic arthouse filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who grew up in Khon Kaen (and needs no introduction):

“When the Kaen Kham cinema opened, it was as if it had been sent down from heaven. It was very close to our house at the hospital, and if you were determined enough, you could walk there. The cinema opening was a grand affair; it was the biggest cinema in Khon Kaen and in the eyes of a child it was comparable to the Colosseum in Rome. As you walked into the darkness you were embraced by its magnificence, and surrendered yourself to the pictures you saw.”

This is from a wonderful essay Apichatpong wrote. I found little reading material about life in Khon Kaen in general, so this is particularly noteworthy. Some excerpts:

Around seventy or more years ago, when people in the west would go to a film premiere, you needed a beautifully designed invitation in order to attend and you would wear a suit or an elegant evening gown to show off your wealth. In the jungles of Khon Kaen it was the same, going to see a film was an event that had to be properly prepared for. You had to travel to the cinema to buy the tickets, wait in the queue, look at the posters and buy your refreshments, almost like a sacred ritual. No matter how bad the film was, it would always seem better for this. On looking back, I don’t think I ever saw a bad film before I was eighteen. Luckily there were no videotapes at that time, so there were cinemas scattered around town, like temples, making it seem a more cultured place. 

[...]

The Khon Kaen and the Raja would show films from the west and they both had a small glass room for the last row of seats, called the soundtrack room. It was a room where you could listen to the “real” voices of the actors. It seemed to be only for a select few since you had to pay more. Our parents always took us to sit in the glass room. I suppose they wanted us to learn English. But you could always hear the Thai dubbed soundtrack filtering in from outside. It made watching those films special, to be able to listen to them in two languages at the same time.

There were times however, when we chose to sit outside the glass room in order to understand the film better. This was where I came to know “Konjanard.” When the trucks advertising the upcoming films would drive up and down the local roads, with their beautifully painted posters, a resounding voice would always finish off the announcements, “Thai dubbing by Konjanard.”

He had a special talent: he could “play” every character in the film, men and women. It seemed a bit strange sometimes, when the voice of a female character on the screen was a little too deep, or when the mouths didn’t move while the characters were conveying their emotions. This, though, was one of the attractions of watching a film; audiences became as captivated with the voices of Rong Kaomoonkadee or Juree Osiri (who dubbed films into their old age) as they did with the Thai films themselves. It’s not surprising then that Thailand didn’t change to sound on film until the 1980s, decades after many other countries, with us thinking all the while that live dubbing was customary around the world.

Of the Prince theater, he said, “It was the final breath of happiness. The Prince cinema was splendidly majestic.”

I recommend reading the whole thing, which has some interesting thoughts about Thai cinema, cinema, ghosts, caves, and life in general.

Apichatpong’s film Cemetery of Splendour is set in Khon Kaen, and the Thai title is Rak Ti Khon Kaen, translating to Love in Khon Kaen. Several of his other films are set in Isan. An interview with the Isaan Record is the most in depth that I found in terms of his relationship to Isan and Khon Kaen.

Panna Rittikrai, another internationally renowned filmmaker but of a very different sort, also comes from Khon Kaen. I wrote about the legendary action director in my Thai cinema post: 

‘Rittikrai, who died in 2014, is really the pioneer of Thai action, making what were basically home movies with local stuntmen. “I had no proper training. I learned martial arts from watching Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan movies. It began with a Bruce Lee film, which I liked very much so I tried to imitate his punches and kicks. After school I would rush home to practice. This was before videotapes so I would go to the cinema - almost 200 times for some movies. When I had mastered one move, I would go back to see another move.”

His early films didn’t find much of an audience in Bangkok but became big in the countryside: “You've probably never heard of my movies. They are popular among taxi drivers and som tam vendors and security guards and Isan coolies. My loyalest fans are folk people in the far-out tambons , where they lay out mattresses on the ground and drink moonshine whiskey while watching my outdoor movies.”

Rittikrai discovered Tony Jaa and they did a lot of low budget films together before getting the attention of the more established, mainstream Prachya Pinkaew with whom they made Ong Bak, and the rest is history.’

Rittikrai is specifically from Tha Phra, a roughly 20 minute drive from Khon Kaen (and only 10 minutes from a cafe we were hanging at), and one train stop over on the (infrequent) local trains. I decided to go to Tha Phra to check out the Wednesday market I read about, which may or may not have shut down. Unfortunately there was nothing there except for some old wooden buildings, which is what I expected. I now know there’s a Friday market (check recent google reviews before going). A bummer, but I still got to see some street art related to Thailand’s action movie heritage. Was worth the trip.