Thailand (Lonely Planet, 13th Edition) - China Williams [419]
Bus Terminal 2 (0 4224 7788), on the Ring Rd west of the city (take srng·ta·ou 6, 7 or 15 or the Yellow Bus), serves western destinations including Loei (ordinary/1st class 70/113B, three hours, every half-hour) and Chiang Mai (2nd class/32-seat VIP 438/657B, 12 hours, five daily).
For Nong Khai (ordinary/1st class 25/47B, one hour, every 45 minutes) you can use either terminal, but the most frequent departures are from Rangsina Market, reached by the White bus or srng·ta·ou 6.
TRAIN
Udon Thani is on the Bangkok–Nong Khai line. Express trains leave Bangkok at 8.20am, 6.30pm and 8pm arriving at Udon station (0 4222 2061) about 10 to 11 hours later. In the reverse direction, departures are at 6.54am, 6.40pm and 7.20pm. The fares to Bangkok are 245/369/1277B for a 3rd-class seat/2nd-class seat/1st-class sleeper.
Getting Around
Srng·ta·ou (8B) run regular routes across town. There are also two city buses (8B), the Yellow and the White. The former runs up and down Th Pho Si–Nittayo and the latter tracks Hwy 2. The free Udon Thani Map shows the routes. Short túk-túk (called skylab here) trips start at 40B and it’s 200B to the airport.
There are many car-hire outlets around Charoensri Complex. A bike-hire outlet in Nong Prajak Park has one-, two- and three-seaters for 20B to 50B per day.
AROUND UDON THANI
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Ban Chiang
This town, 50km east of Udon, was once an important centre of the ancient Ban Chiang civilisation, an agricultural society that thrived in northeastern Thailand for thousands of years. Archaeological digs here have uncovered a treasure trove of artefacts dating back to 3600 BC that overturned the prevailing theory that Southeast Asia was a cultural backwater compared to China and India at the time.
What’s now one of Southeast Asia’s most important archaeological sites was discovered quite accidentally in 1966. Stephen Young, an anthropology student from Harvard, tripped while walking through the area and found the rim of a buried pot right under his nose. Looking around he noticed many more and speculated that this might be a burial site. He was right. The first serious excavations took place in 1974–75 and they uncovered over a million pottery pieces, as well as 126 human skeletons. Researchers later uncovered the earliest evidence of farming and the manufacture of metal tools (they began working bronze c 2000 BC) in the region. Seven layers of civilisation have been excavated here; the famous burnt-ochre swirl-design pottery comes from the third and fourth layers. The area was declared a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1992.
The excellent, recently expanded Ban Chiang National Museum (0 4220 8340; admission 150B; 8.30am-4.30pm) exhibits a wealth of pottery from all Ban Chiang periods, plus myriad metal objects including spearheads, sickles, fish hooks, ladles, neck rings and bangles. The displays (with English labels) offer excellent insight into the region’s distant past and how its mysteries were unravelled. There is an original burial ground excavation pit (admission incl in museum ticket; 8.30am-6pm), with a cluster of 52 individual burial sites dating to 300 BC, 1km east at Wat Pho Si Nai. It shows how bodies were buried with (infants were placed inside) pottery.
The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology (www.museum.upenn.edu) has good information about Ban Chiang on its website. From the home page, type Ban Chiang into the search engine.
Rice cultivation remains the town’s primary livelihood, but souvenir selling is now a close second. Many area villages make handicrafts such as basketry and clothes sewn with a distinctive rough cotton fabric called fâi sên yài (big thread fabric). These and more can be bought from shops facing the museum. Walk down the road facing the museum to find a pottery workshop; you’ll pass a cotton-weaving co-op on the way into town. Locals