Lamphun

Lamphun is a small town very close to Chiang Mai (like 30 minutes!) that doesn’t get a ton of tourists. I won’t say it’s all that exciting, there’s nothing so extraordinary to see, and it’s close to other places that have more going on (we came after our great stay in Lampang, less than two hours away by train). With that said, I loved my 45ish hour stay (in June 2024). For people on short Thailand trips, I definitely wouldn’t prioritize it, but it has its charms and I would recommend it for people who stay for extended periods of time in northern Thailand. It’s definitely worth a trip for a day or weekend for people who live in Chiang Mai. It’s mostly known for history and temples (and longans), but it is also quiet, inexpensive, has great food, great cafes to work from, a great Friday night market, etc.

We actually picked Lamphun to stop in while working our way to Chiang Rai because they have a great looking bean to bar chocolate maker called Tarm which has a small shop/cafe. It turns out they were closed for a week when we came because they were at a chocolate festival in Khon Kaen. Oops! I’m glad I went anyway, though, and I have an excuse to go back. Also, gotta respect any place that shuts shop because the owner goes out of town. I think a lot of places in Lamphun are like that, and that’s part of its charm.

We stayed at a lovely farmstay called Baan Suan Suk Jai Organic Farm, around 15 minutes outside of town. We contacted them on Facebook but they also have rooms on Airbnb. It was a great stay. The room is clean and comfortable, the area is beautiful, and the owners were very nice, not only picking us up from the train station but also dropping us off and picking us up from the town as it may not be so easy to get cabs there. Of course, I can’t promise you’ll get the same treatment, they might be busier when you come, but I’m sure they’ll at least be very nice to you as well and will help you out however they can. We also ate most of our meals there and the food was simple but good and made with mostly homegrown ingredients. I’m not into fried foods that much but the fried mushrooms were 10/10. We were there for two nights, arriving around noon the first day, and we spent that whole day there working. It was a great, beautiful place to relax and get work done. My wife was very happy that they make surprisingly excellent coffee, with their own mini La Marzocco machine and coffee from a local roaster, and delicious iced tea as well. I wish we could have stayed longer!

We spent the entire second day in the town of Lamphun, mostly in the historical center surrounded by old city walls which still stand in places, exploring for half the day and working for the other half from some nice cafes. Unlike square Chiang Mai, Lamphun is oval-shaped, and it is also much smaller. You can walk from one end to the other horizontally in roughly ten minutes and vertically in roughly 15 minutes.

It is also older than Chiang Mai, and there are a few things still standing that are plausibly from the 7th or 8th centuries, or maybe the 12th century. The dates are disputed and I don’t feel like adjudicating them here, but even the more conservative estimates I believe would make some of the temples here the oldest that I’ve seen in Thailand. Though the city is famous for its 1000ish year old temples when it was the capital of the Hariphunchai kingdom, I also found a lot of charm in the modern architecture from the mid-20th century, which is evidently underappreciated because a google search for “Lamphun modern architecture” turned up nothing relevant, though I think a Thai language search would have been more fruitful. 

I began the morning with a poorly advertised sightseeing tour by tram, which takes you to 8 places (the brochure says 10, but it’s really 8 as the first stop is the temple starting point that you have to see on your own either before/after the tour and one other stop didn’t exist) and costs 100 baht for foreigners. It says it takes three hours but it only took about two hours. You get it from a building mysteriously not on Google Maps (tagged here), next to the bridge across from the main temple (Wat Phra That Haripunchai). There’s basically no info for it online that I can find. Our farmstay hosts didn’t know about it. As of the time I went, it was twice a day, at 9:30 AM and 1:30 PM (I think). We were the only people on the tour. Gee, I wonder why?

I’m mixed on recommending the tour. I had fun, and it was nice being ferreted around and not having to think about anything, and most of the stops are outside of the town center so you’d want a car to get to them. With that said, you go to four temples which was really overkill, and I didn’t care that much about the silk center we went to. It’s a better tour for locals (and some foreigners, I suppose) who really care about the spiritual significance of a few of the temples and the amulets they sell. To the non-spiritually inclined, much of what I saw, however nice, was like any other temple in Thailand. I’m glad I did the tour, but you can feel comfortable skipping it and just seeing the highlights on your own.

The highlight of the tour was the Chamdevi Temple (also spelled Chamathewi, Jamatewi, Chamadevi, etc, Wikipedia says Camadevi), which is my favorite historical site in Lamphun and is a short drive outside of the town center. Queen Chamdevi’s ashes are supposedly buried here, whether you care is not especially relevant to your enjoyment of the place. The very old pyramid shaped brick chedi has 60 buddha sculptures in its niches, and it’s something quite different from other temples in Thailand. It’s also a nice, peaceful place with hardly anyone there. 

The temple hall has murals telling the story of the city’s history, but without descriptions of what’s happening. The Chamdevi monument in the southwest corner of the walled city tells you the story both visually and with text, though not with a ton of detail. I suppose that’s worthwhile, it was kind of cool. Not a must. There’s a quick telling of some of the Chamdevi legends on the great Siam Rat blog, that might be helpful. It says the statue there is by the famous Italian sculptor Silpa Bhirasri (aka Corrado Feroci) but I don’t see that written anywhere else and he died in 1962, before the monument opened in 1982, though it’s possible the statue existed before then.

You can also see paintings telling the story at the large Wat Phra That Haripunchai complex, which is the top thing to see in the city. The giant gold chedi is the city’s iconic visual and can be seen walking around the town, and there are some very old brick chedis in the complex as well as many nice buildings and a small museum. Nothing here is mindblowing, but if you like temples and feel like you need to see more, then it’s worthwhile. I mean, if you are coming here you might as well see the main temple. Other than the old brick parts I didn’t find it especially noteworthy, but it’s very nice. At the eastern entrance of the temple there’s a coffee shop called Hariphunchai, possibly affiliated with the temple, which had its own Hariphunchai special coffee. I didn’t feel like going in to ask what it was (probably longan), but a temple with its own special coffee is very Thailand.

The other noteworthy sight is the memorial to Chamdevi’s elephant and horse, a short drive outside the city center. It’s peaceful and has people coming to pray and give offerings, and it is a charming oddity. Do you need to go there? You decide.

If you are interested in silks, I recommend Lamphun Thai Silk. I guess.

The one other temple that was noteworthy is the Wat San Pa Yang Luang, which is full of ornate carvings. I would have liked it better if it weren’t the fifth temple I saw that day. The sign said something to the extent that it’s the oldest monastery in northern Thailand, but I think everything there was pretty new. 

The one other touristy thing I did was go to the Lamphun Community Museum, in a wooden house that belonged to local royalty. Not that exciting, but worth a stroll. It’s small and free. It had old photos of the town next to new photos from the same angles, I liked that. It had a seemingly random assortment of old stuff. Go if you want, it gave a sense of what the town was like in the early to mid 20th century. There was some other house museum thing nearby, and this is also right by the Hari Phun Chai National Museum which looked like it had a great display of local artifacts, but I didn’t make the time for it.

None of this sightseeing was as good as just walking around, eating, working from cafes, and enjoying the life of the town. If I had more time in my schedule I would have gladly spent a week there. 

I recommend walking the entirety of the main vertical road in the center. Look out for the old gas station, another minor palace, and some cool modern architecture.

The Friday night walking street was probably the day’s highlight. Very nice market. If you aren’t there on a Friday, the big Nong Dok market is active all day long and had a bunch of stalls set up in the evening selling food and produce. Great looking produce at low prices. Definitely worth a stroll at any time of day.

We had a great time working from Temple House, a fancy cafe with an upstairs art gallery (for more art in town check out Krungthai Art Factory, I only walked by in the evening when it was closed but I think it’s a gallery). Before the tour in the morning we picked up from a nice cafe called Black to Basics, and we tried a place called Terbto which wasn’t as nice to sit at but was great quality. Of course there are a million other nice looking cafes, we could only go to so many, and as I mentioned above I sadly couldn’t make it to Tarm. Best of all was Itim.nuar, an excellent ice cream shop! The kale flavor was intense. Since longans are the local special, they have a rum and longan flavor, that was very good. It was all good.

The culinary highlight was the famous Longan Noodles, just a few minutes walking distance past the bridge outside the main temple. You can get it soupy, the classic way, or dry, which they said they can do for vegetarians since the broth has pork in it, but then they came back and said they also have vegetarian broth too, which seemed kind of random. I decided to play it safe and get it dry, and anyway I don’t like soupy things. It was great! A bit sweet at first but I added a dab of soy sauce and it was perfect. I’d describe it kind of like pad thai but with longan instead of tamarind. Make sure they put peanuts and unripe mango. I also got longan juice, which I generally avoid because they always add sugar, but I thought why not get it here. It was very good. Note that I was here outside of longan season. I’m not sure if they used dried longans or fresh logans.

The area around the restaurant is cute. More village-like than the town, but with street art and done up a bit for tourists. There’s a temple, cloth factory, and museum, listed on google as Huean Yong Ancient Cloth Museum, just a minute away, not that interesting but cute. I saw longan trees while walking around. The bridge was once a covered OTOP shop but it was torn down when I was there, but my wife liked the shopping on the street.

Other than that I snacked at a few vegetarian places. There are a handful in and around the city center. I came to Jay Khang Wat around 3pm so the selection was very limited. A fairly standard Jay place but good, and the owner was very sweet. More notable was a place called Healthy Vegan which is definitely different from your typical Jay place. They serve Chinese medicinal herbal soup noodles, with a broth made of, if I recall correctly, 26 different herbs, spices, dried fruits, etc. Also, unlike most Jay places, they are open until 8pm! You pick which noodles you want (options are a flat rice noodle, red rice vermicelli, or a green noodle with seaweed and spirulina), and since the very nice and enthusiastic owner spoke some English I could get what I wanted in it, with extra tofu and veggies and without the fake meats. Though they aren’t on the menu, the owner said he could also make us a few other things like pad kaprao, but we were only hungry for a snack so we passed. I hope to come back one day though! Something fun, different, and healthy. It’s also one of the only places I’ve seen in Thailand advertising that they use coconut oil. 

I wanted to eat at a nice looking northern Thai place called Junpha that I saw randomly on google maps and thought looked good but they were closed the weekend I went. And a northern Thai restaurant called Dao Kanong is recommended by Austin Bush, who literally wrote the book on the food of northern Thailand and whose opinion I hold in high regard.

There are a number of other things just outside the city that I would have liked to do but didn’t have time for. I really wanted to go to the Terracotta Garden which looks awesome and is owned by the same people who have the Terracotta Arts Hotel in Chiang Mai. There’s also the Dharma Park and Inson Wongsam Art Gallery which looks interesting. The artist is famous and his story sounds cool. He “travelled solo by scooter from Bangkok to Italy in 1963. Italy was the homeland of his revered professor, Silpa Bhirasri, who is esteemed as “the father of Thai modern art”, and Inson wanted to learn more about art there. He set off with a friend, but when they reached India, the friend decided to turn back, and Inson continued the odyssey alone. Along the way he did more sketches and paintings and sold them to cover costs.“ Source, and there are some more art galleries mentioned in there.

The excellent Southeast Asia Movie Theater Project reported in 2009 on the old single screen cinema in town. I didn’t see it while walking around, nor could I find it on the map. Not sure if it still stands. Today there are just some chain multiplexes.