Naga Fireball Festival @ NongKhai

[RogerSg]

Planning a trip to witness this unusal phenomenon shooting of fireballs from Mighty Mekong River coming 06Oct~08Oct. Understand best location is at Phon Pisai. Your comments and assistance appreciated.

[Gaybutton]

Planning a trip to witness this unusal phenomenon shooting of fireballs from Mighty Mekong River coming 06Oct~08Oct. Understand best location is at Phon Pisai. Your comments and assistance appreciated.

 

I went last year. There are several supposedly good loacations and Phon Pisai is one of them.

 

First, I would urge you to make your hotel reservations right now. This attracts a great many Thai people and many make their reservations months and months in advance.

 

Once you are there, you're going to need transporation of some kind because most hotels are nowhere near where you'll have to go to see the fireballs.

 

You also need to get there one night prior to the fireballs. You need to leave the hotel very early the next morning if you want any chance at all of avoiding the traffic jams and then getting a good spot. You're going to be sitting out there all day in blistering hot sun. Be prepared for that. Most locations have plenty of concessionaires, so food and water are no problem, but you want to be somewhere where you can get to a restroom and out of the sun.

 

We endured that for all those hours and last year there were only two fireballs. Sometimes there are dozens, but at least we saw two of them. It was a difficult day, to be sure, but I'm glad we did it and I am thinking about doing it again.

[RogerSg]

I went last year. There are several supposedly good loacations and Phon Pisai is one of them.

 

First, I would urge you to make your hotel reservations right now. This attracts a great many Thai people and many make their reservations months and months in advance.

 

Once you are there, you're going to need transporation of some kind because most hotels are nowhere near where you'll have to go to see the fireballs.

 

You also need to get there one night prior to the fireballs. You need to leave the hotel very early the next morning if you want any chance at all of avoiding the traffic jams and then getting a good spot. You're going to be sitting out there all day in blistering hot sun. Be prepared for that. Most locations have plenty of concessionaires, so food and water are no problem, but you want to be somewhere where you can get to a restroom and out of the sun.

 

We endured that for all those hours and last year there were only two fireballs. Sometimes there are dozens, but at least we saw two of them. It was a difficult day, to be sure, but I'm glad we did it and I am thinking about doing it again.

Great to hear of your experience, reserved the last room @ Big Snake Guest House which the happengs just at doorstep pior 2 days before shot of the fireball. Its 42Km away from Nongkhai. I guess One has to endure all weather factors and looking forward to this auspicious day. Might rent a bike to move around as a local friend is joinning me who has also never been there. Will adjourn to Udon Thani probably 9/10Oct. Crossing the friendly bridge is also in my itinerary. Tks for your good advice.

[Gaybutton]

I managed to find a posting I made on my own web site last year, right after we returned from our trip. It is quite a bit more detailed. Here it is again:

__________

 

As many of you know,I spent the past several days traveling to the Udon Thani area to witness the Naga Fireballs. I traveled with a close friend, his boyfriend, and my boyfriend. We gave some thought to flying to Udon Thani and then renting a car, but we opted to make the 10-hour drive instead. That way we could do some additional sightseeing and have much more freedom of movement than we otherwise could have had.

 

This was the first time I've made the drive to that area of Thailand. The roads are surprisingly good. We had no problems at all. I've decided not to name the hotel at which we stayed in Udon Thani. I'll give them credit for providing spotless, large rooms with good basic amenities, a comfortable bed, and excellent bathroom facilities. Other than that I wouldn't make a special trip.

 

They do provide breakfast with the room. It is, however, the most God-awful breakfast I remember ever having. Two ice cold eggs, not properly cooked, stale toast, badly done coffee, a slice of poor quality ham, half a hotdog-like sausage and crummy service. They don't give you a menu. You just walk in and take what they give you. Needless to say, that was the first and last time we ate the breakfast.

 

We arrived on the night of October 16. The room was 700 baht. The next two nights were going to be 900 baht due to the Naga fireballs festival, which marks the end of Buddhist Lent. The fireballs festival was going to occur on the night of October 18, so we had a full day to see what Udon Thani is all about. I think I fully understand now why so many boys from Udon Thani, and similar areas of Thailand, choose to work in the gay bars. There's really nothing there at all except for rice farms. There are a couple discos and karokes, and a good shopping mall, with a movie theater and bowling alley, and that's about it. Of course, most of these boys can afford only to walk through the shopping mall once in awhile without being able to buy a thing.

 

We spent the day driving around. We ended up at the Phu Phrabat Historical Park which was about 60 kilometers outside of Udon Thani. It was nice, but not, in my opinion, worth a special trip. The ruins were quite ancient and there were even cave drawings, but it's way out in the middle of nowhere. If you don't have a car, you're not going . . .

 

We also did some shopping. We spent some time at the Banchiang National Museum. That, I thought, was worth it. It's the best archeological museum I've seen in Thailand. The restored city was quite interesting and the museum featured large quantities of ancient artifacts, especially earthenware vases. There is plenty of street market shopping just outside the museum. We came home with plenty of replica vases at amazingly inexpensive prices.

 

The morning of the 18th, sans the hotel breakfast, we headed up toward Nong Khai. That's where the Mekong River is, and that's where the fireballs are seen. We were advised to get there before lunchtime in order to avoid major traffic problems. This phenomenon attracts hundreds of thousands of people from all over Thailand. We ended up at a Buddhist temple, right on the Mekong River shore. We were not exactly there by ourselves. There had to be at least 100,000 people in that location alone. We were told, after we got there, that this was actually the best location in all of Thailand to view the phenomenon.

 

We arrived shortly past noon. Nothing was expected to happen before 7:00 PM. There was a carnival-like atmosphere, with plenty of food, souvenir sales, etc. We staked out our claim on some benches that seemed to offer the best view. And then we waited . . . I mean we waited and waited and waited and waited. The heat of the day was almost intolerable and there wasn't a breath of breeze at all. We were roasting alive. To add to the misery, a tout on a microphone was blaring his sales pitch, non-stop, all day. I have to admire somebody who can scream into a microphone six or seven hours straight, without a pause. Add to that the inevitable blaringly loud, constant music, and that's what we endured the entire day. The temple, at least, did have restrooms available. They were filthy squatters, but at least they were there.

 

We almost decided that it just isn't worth going through this, no matter how spectacular the phenomenon might turn out to be, but after having driven so long to get there we weren't about to give up. Finally the sun went down. Unfortunately it didn't relieve the heat. If anything, the heat increased because all the people who came to see the phenomenon began to crowd in around us and there was no possibility of a breeze reaching us. So, we looked across the Mekong River, at Laos, as the sun set and we waited again. It was completely dark by 6:30. 7:00 PM finally came. No fireballs. There were plenty of lit up decorated barges, and fire floats meandering down the river, but no fireballs. Kids constantly lit firecrackers and shot off bottle rockets, but no fireballs.

 

7:30 PM . . . still nothing. We were dying from the heat, but we stayed on. 8:00 PM . . . nothing.

 

Then, at about 8:15 suddenly a bright red globe began to slowly rise up from the river. It appeared to be the size of a basketball. Just our luck, it was partially obscured by a sign, but everyone was oohing and ahhing, and there it was! It lasted about thirty or forty seconds before it dissipated.

 

Then, again, nothing. At about 8:40 another one rose up, from a completely different spot in the river. It too lasted about thirty or forty seconds.

 

Then nothing again. A little after 9:00 PM we had enough. We weren't alone. Throngs of people also had enough for one day and were starting to leave. We decided to get going too. We at least got to see two of them, but this year that's all there was. We found out the next day that the two we saw were the only ones to to appear along the river at all this year. Even after we left there were no more.

 

We were told that some years it's spectacular and some years you're lucky to see any at all. We were there during an off year, apparently, but we did at least get to see two of them.

 

I can tell you one thing. I no longer believe that the fireballs are man-made. I just can't conceive of anything man-made being limited to a grand total of two, with hundreds of thousands of people there. It was too dark to even have a hope of seeing what these fireballs actually are or what causes them, but I am convinced that whatever they are, it's a natural occurrence. We said there's no way we'll do this again, although a year is a long time.

 

I would like to see it some time when it is spectacular. My boyfriend's father said the year he went to see it there were twenty fireballs. Some years there are hundreds. If you want to experience it, you'll just have to take your chances as we did. We all agreed it was well worth the trip and we did have a wonderful time and a lot of fun, other than suffering through the waiting period that day. Also, we didn't come away totally disappointed. We did get to see two of them, and that beats having gone through all that and seeing nothing at all, which is probably exactly what happened at many other locations along the river.

 

We also give the police a lot of credit. They were out there in massive numbers as people were leaving. They opened the highway only in one direction. The only direction you could go was toward Nong Khai and Udon Thani. We thought, with the massive numbers of people there that we would be hours getting back to the hotel. We made it back in 90 minutes. I have no idea what produces these fireballs, but at least the two we saw were indeed spectacular. We tried to take some photos, but our cameras are just not sophistocated enough to be able to capture anything more than a red streak, and that doesn't even begin to do justice to what we saw.

 

Would I consider doing this again? Ask me next October.