Life in Phana

Boun Pravet: Procession to the Wat

The procession from Don Chao Poo Forest back to the wat is a loud and lively affair. Here are some pictures of this year's procession.

 

 

An important part of the festival is the parading of this long banner which tells the story of Prince Vessandorn pictorially. When it reaches the wat it is stretched along three walls of the big sala to serve as a bckdrop for the ceremony which takes place on the following day.

 

 

 

These two children were playing the role of Prince Vessandorn's children who have been returned to him and accompany him back to his city.

 

 

There were many more monks than usual in the procession this year. Many of them had come to Phana for the celebration of the four promotions I posted about previously.

 

Most of the children walked alongside the procession but a few of them walked in it, and this young man obviously enjoyed carrying a banner, though it must have been hardwork for him.

 

When the procession reached the old marketplace, it was greeted by very loud firecrakers to warn off any demons who might have been lurking around. Some firecrackers had been let off for the same purpose as the procession started to move off back in Don Chao Poo.

 

But this is what the children were waiting for. The senior monks riding in the back of a pick-up truck kept throwing out handfuls of one baht coins and there was an excited scramble to pick them up. A few adults took part too (it is supposed to bring more luck than actual monetary gain) but those I saw passed the coins on to children.

 

In my next post I will explain what happens in the wat on the following day.
 
 
  

 

Boun Pravet: Gathering in the Forest

The Boun Pravet festival is concerned with re-telling the story of the penultimate life of the Buddha, for Thais the favourite and best known of the Jataka stories. It is the Mahachad, ‘the great story’. It tells of Prince Vessandorn (Pravet), son of King Sri Sanjaya, who gave away his white rain-producing elephant to a nearby kingdom which was experiencing drought. He was driven out of his home city with his beloved wife and two children. He never hesitated in giving away anything that was asked of him and even parted with his children and his wife when they were requested. In the end, his wife and children were restored to him as reward for his generosity and the people of his city went to the forest to beg him to return to rule them. As a result of his unfailing generosity and his complete lack of ‘clinging’ he was reborn into his final incarnation.

In Phana, monks and lay people assembled in Don Chao Poo Forest in the afternoon after performing a ceremony calling Phra Uppakrut, as recounted in my previous post. Signs of royalty play an imporant role: a white horse, an elephant, a red and gold umbrella, banners and lay people in smart clothes are the most obvious indicators.

While people were assembling, the Mayor of Tetsaban Phana, Khun Prachoenlap, welcomed people and kept them amused. This was the first time I had witnessed Boun Pravet being celebrated on a Saturday, and so the number of people present was much greater than any I had seen before. In fact Boun Pravet is a festival that has no particular fixed date, but in Phana it is always celebrated at the time of Maha Pucha.

 

 
A senior monk recited from memory a summary of the story. This year, a lay man was taking the part of the prince. He was invited to return to the 'city' and was carried back on the back of the  white horse in a loud, happy procession. His 'children' rode on the elephant. His wife did not seem to have a role!  The other lay people were re-enacting that part of the story when they went to the forest to invite the prince to reurn to their city.

 In my next post I will show some pictures of the procession as it made its way back to Wat Phra Lao.

 

 

 

Boun Pravet: Phra Uppakrut

Last weekend Maha Pucha Day was celebrated in much of Thailand, but hardly at all here in Phana. It never is, because the people here celebrate Boun Pravet on the same day. Maha Pucha has been a Thai national holiday since the reign of King Mongkut (Rama IV, 1851-1868), but celebrating Boun Pravet is a much older Lao tradition. The two-day celebration of Boun Pravet began on Saturday mornng, the second phase was in the afternoon and it continued throughout Sunday.

The festival always begins with a little ritual calling Phra Uppakrut to protect the space where the main ceremony will take place. In Phana that meant Wat Phra Lao this year. Phana's two main wats are the focus of the festival on alternate years and monks from wats thoughout the amphur come to take part.

Just who or what Phra Uppakrut is, is a matter for conjecture because there seems little agreement between people, even in Isan where he has an important place in Buddhist iconography and in the traditional celebration of this festival. He is certainly associated with ponds and swamps. He is said to have risen from a swamp, either because he is a swamp spirit of some sort (some say he is the lord of the nagas) or because he was a monk (hence the title Phra) who was meditating in a swamp when called upon to preside over a meeting of monks. The paraphanalia associated with him (monk's bowl, kettle and so on) also point to him being thought of as a monk. The men performing the rituals were keen to point out to me that he is not wearing a hat, rather it is a lotus leaf that he dislodged when he rose from the swamp. Note also that he is always depicted as holding a long-stemmed lotus flower.

Everyone seems to agree that Phra Uppakrut is the enemy of Mara (the personification of disruption and hindrance) and so calling him to attend the festival ensures that all is peaceful and calm in the village and the wat for the duration of the celebrations.

  The first ritual was conducted at the south-western corner of Kud Phra Lao, the large pond to the west of the temple compound. A sedan chair had been prepared together wth several ritual items, most notably flowers and the usual kind of offerings made to spirits and angels. A man then went into the pond and emerged with a small black  image  of Phra Uppakrut. Presumably the image had been placed there previously. Arriving late, I only saw him come out of the water with the image from a distance.

The 'diver' was also the ritual expert (mor kwan) who called on Uppakrut to attend the festival. He placed various small banana-leaf-wrapped packages of food in the yellow bowl when he had finished the invocation. The image and ritual items were then carried to Wat Phra Lao and another small rite was performed at the staue of Phra Uppakrut after circling him three times in a clockwise direction.

 

 

As with other aspects of this festival, I know that the rituals are not necessarily carried out in exactly this way in other parts of Isan. Even in Phana there are small variations and elaborations from one year to the next.

In my next post I will show what happened later the same day when monks and lay people gathered in Don Chao Poo, our local forest.

 

Celebrating the Promotion of Monks in Phana

 

Last Saturday morning a celebration was held in the sala / viharn at Wat Phra Lao to celebrate the promotion of four local monks. It was a 'long weekend' in Thailand because Maha Pucha Day, a national holiday, fell on the Sunday so Monday was a compensating holiday. That means that lots of people who live and work away from Phana return for the weekend to their true homes, family, relatives and friends. Never mind that Maha Pucha Day is not really celebrated in Phana, nor in much of eastern Isan where the older Lao traditions are still held to be of more relevance.

Four local monks were being publicly promoted at this ceremony. The acting abbot of Wat Phra Lao, Phra Phandit, was being made abbot. The abbot of Wat Don Kuan was being promoted to Chao Kana Tambon Phana (Head of the monks in Tambon Phana), a post held by the previous abbot of Wat Phra Lao. Two younger monks were appointed one as deputy and one as secretary to the Chao Kana Tambon. The newly-appointed Nai Amphur (District Officer) read out the citations for each of the four monks.

The monk presiding over the ceremony was the Chao Kana Changwat, the head monk of Amnat Chaoen Province. He later presented the four monks with their citations. He also delivered a rather long talk. I found it interesting that he began in Thai, but very quickly reverted to speaking in Lao. The first part in Thai was very formal, about the promotions, a reference to Maha Pucha being the day when the Buddha addressed a large gathering of monks and on this occasion there were upwards of 60 local monks present. But when he switched to Lao his talk became much less formal, he made jokes (difficult to do in a foreign language) and he addressed his listeners directly, often demanding a verbal response as well as the appreciative laughter.

In return the four monks presented robes, flowers and so on to him and to the other senior monks present. The new abbot of Wat Phra Lao presented an image of Phra Lao to the new Nai Amphur.

At the end of the Chao Kana Changwat's talk he invited the Nai Amphur to speak and pointedly said he should speak in Lao. He did not do so, though he hesitated and did end with a few words of Lao after saying that he was born in Ubon Province. Officials and official business is always conducted in Thai. Thai is the language of authority. It is the most obvious weapon of cultural imperialism and symbol of supposed cultural superiority. That being the case, it makes the CKC's prolonged and preferred use of Lao interesting and significant, I think.

The next part of the ceremony was neither Buddhist nor conducted in Thai. A traditional baci was held for the four monks. This ceremony was to recall the 32 Kwan to their rightful homes with each of their human hosts, the four monks, and it was conducted by a lay 'expert'.

Here he is sitting next to the Pha Kwan.

After he had called the kwan the lay people tied small pieces of sacred white thread around the monks wrists. At least, that is what the men did, the women only laid the thread across each monk's wrist, being careful not to touch him.

 

 

 

There were plenty of gaps in the ceremony when people could get to chat. Here is Pensri joking with the Nai Amphur and me being very serious with the two vounteers, Sarah and Lauren.

The morning ended with a communal meal prepared by the good people of Moo 9 and served by pupils fom Phana Suksa School.

Unfortunately my camera by that time needed to be re-charged so there are no pictures of the lunch. It was a good one, though, take my word for it.

 

 

 

Monks in Phra Ubosot, Phana

My previous post concerned the preparations for the special somphot ceremony at Wat Phra Lao which took place last weekend. Two years ago I filmed some video of the same ceremony. It included footage taken inside the Phra Ubosot. It is quite rare to see such footage,  I think,  and I felt quite privileged when the monks at Wat Phra Lao invited me to film inside.

I have posted a 4-minute clip to my YouTube Channel. You will hear chanting led by the monks in the ubosot and joined by the lay people outside.

 

Here are a few stills taken from the clip.

 

 

Third Month Festival in Phana

Did you know that we are well into the third lunar month? Not to worry. Later in the year the eighth month will occur twice. It does this every few years so that the lunar calendar can more or less catch up with the more usual Gregorian calendar. A bit like leap year adding a day, but in this case adding a month. I'm not sure how that works out as far as birthdays go for people born in the second of the eighth month . Not my problem.

Wat Phra Lao here in Phana always celebrates its temple festival at the time of the full moon of the third month. So the celebrations were this past weekend. In the past I have taken some pretty unsuccessful photos of the night-time activities so this year I photographed the preparations, which were still taking place an hour or two before things kicked off.

 

Every year the bot and the area in front of it is made to look really beautiful. Monks and lay people work together on the preparations.

 

Monks from lots of monasteries in the surrounding area are drafted in to help. They do a lot of rushing about, not their usual measured, calm way of moving.

 

Many of the ritual items are waiting to be put in their proper place:

 

 

On the first night of the festival a ceremony known locally as somphot is held. This means celebration, but the ceremony is also one where sacrilization or consecration takes place. There is a special kind of chanting by experienced monks in the ubosot and one monk meditates there all night. Outside, lay people dressed in white who have taken eight precepts repeat a chant 108 times, each one 108 syllables long. They do it in 9 'blocks', each block consisting of 12 repetitions. Are you still with me? Has the pattern emerged? It is a lot of chanting, not finishing until about 4 a.m. It is very melodic, very soothing, and puts me to sleep in bed 200 metres away.

 

 

Chanters sit underneath this grid of sacred thread. The small balls of thread are rolled down to be held or tied to the person sitting beneath it. Everyone is attached to the main Buddha image in this way.

 

 

 

People bring things precious to them to be blessed. The items are wrapped carefully, usually in canvas bags, and they have to be registered and clearly identifiable so that they can be collected by the rightful owners after the ceremony.

 

 

 

Not everything that is brought along to be blessed can be wrapped up. But everything is linked to the chanters and to the image of Phra Lao. If you have been missing some of your taxis in Bangkok, at least you know that they are safer now.

 

 

 

So are our local buses:

 
There are hundreds of images inside the bot waiting to be blessed.

And the acting abbot is checking that things are as they should be in there:

 

Behind him is this amazing naga made mostly out of banana leaves:

 

 

The energy that flows through all the monks and lay people who gather on this night must be very powerful. It all stems from the image known as Phra Lao, revered by all the villagers of Phana and known throughout eastern Isan as the most beautiful of all the images in these parts.

 

 

 
 

History of Muang Phana book launch

Pensri has been collecting material for a history of Phana for about ten years. Her father had a big collection of books and documents on the subject and several people in the village have added to her collection by allowing her to photo-copy written materials they had, as well as offering her photographs. Wat Phra Lao has a big collection of black and white photos and they let her browse through the whole lot and she borrowed many.

An important source was the History of Laos by ML Manich Jumsai published in English in Bangkok in 1967. It is out of print but our son Dominic found a copy and gave it to Pensri.

Other people in the village contributed work of their own. The abbot of Wat Burapha, Phra Maha Jantee, wrote a history of Buddhist education as it related to Phana. Phana has been a noted centre of Buddhism since the middle of the 19th century when a monk from the village (Yakru Boonma) studied at Wat Bovornivet in Bangkok with the future King Mongkut (Rama IV). Rama IV sent him back to Isaan to reform the sangha. Since his day there have been several Phana men who have become abbots of the Thammayut wat in Ubon, Wat Supatanaram.

 

Other contributions concerned palm-leaf texts, phaya (the Lao wisdom expressed through word-play) and the weaving traditionally (and still) done in the village.

Last November was the centenary of Pensri's father's birth and she had hoped to have the book ready for that. She didn't quite make it, but nevertheless the book is dedicated to him and her mother to mark the hundred years and the publication was sponsored by the whole extended family, more than a hundred people spread throughout Thailand now.

 

The book is not going to be for sale but will be offered to interested people locally. The first to receive a copy were the 120 people who last week attended a reunion of Matayom Phana school which was founded 72 years ago and closed 46 years ago. Pensri left 50 years ago.

 

Then on Tuesday Pensri and her two older sisters had an appointment in Ubon with the Governor. They presented him with 150 copies to issue to schools there. During the course of their meeting with the Governor, Pensri was telling him how how her childhood experience catching crickets stood her in good stead when she worked in the biology lab at Exeter University in England. It seems the farangs were afraid to handle the crickets. It then emerged that the Governor had been born and raised in Isan, at Chaiyaphum, and used to catch crickets by pouring water down little holes and pickng them up by their antenna when they floated upwards. A good laugh was had by all!

This picture was taken after the meeting. The man is the Governor's PR man.

 

Friday was another difficult but proud day for Pensri. She had offered the Provincial Education office copies to distribute to schools and the Head of the Education department (a Phana man, and one of Pensri's first cousins) had picked them up earlier in the week. Then he rang to say that he wanted to distribute them to Head Teachers at a meeting in Amnat Charoen on Friday. Pensri had to make a speech, which she hates doing, so she spent the previous night rehearsing it endlessly with me timing it (at just about 3 minutes, short for a Thai speech). It went fine.

So Phana's 300 years of history is in print and all Pensri has to do now is send off two copies to the National Library, as must be done for every book with an ISBN.

 

Funeral ceremonies for the former abbot

My very first post on this blog reported the death of Phrakru Udom, the abbot of Wat Phra Lao Thepnimit, Phana, Amnat Charoen Province. He was someone I had known off and on for 40 years, mostly off for the first 30 but we met frequently in the last 10 years. I recorded some of my memories of him here so I won't repeat myself. His cremation ceremony was held yesterday (Sunday) in the grounds of Wat Phra Lao and like almost everybody else in Phana, Pensri and I attended.

For the last couple of weeks there has been a lot of activity in the wat. Next weekend the annual boun wat or temple festival will be held. So the area in front of the ubosot has been decorated for that while the area between the main viharn and the crematorium has been decorated and furnished for the funeral. 'Furnished' because six marquees have been erected to shade people, seating provided, the monks' platform set up, and so on. Monks from all round Phana have been drafted in to help with the preparations and local lay people have also been assisting. The men moving furniture, the women providing food, the monks arranging various paraphenalia. It is very much a division of labour and I don't need to point out that there has not been much crossing of gender lines. That's all right by me, it seems a way of organising activities so that everyone knows what they are supposed to do and they get on with it. Crossing of gender borders does take place (when I sit in the wrong place at a ceremony, for example) and nobody actually minds.

On Saturday evening a lot of people gathered for the final evening chanting and when the ceremony had finished I took a few photos. This was the special sala that had been built to house the coffin:  

This one was taken for me and was really a misunderstanding. I had asked Mr Ing, our local undertaker (and much else) if it was alright for me to take a picture. He took this to mean I wanted my picture taken. So this one is down to him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the photo above, the family of Phrakru Udom are performing a short rite with four monks before leaving the wat for te night.

I took a look at the arrangements that had been made for the monks to chant. The legless chairs were something I hadn't seen before and they clearly signalled the seniority of the ten monks who were going to do the chanting. You can see one of the seats on the right of the picture. On the other hand, the altar was quite unadorned, in contrast to just about everything else.

On Sunday, the cremation ceremony started at 2 p.m. A lot of people were in the temple compound well before that time but others kept arriving for the next hour or so. The ceremony proceeded much as any other Thai Buddhist cremation does, but on a larger scale. If you want to know how a family funeral is conducted, take a look at  My Thai Friend where you will find detailed descriptions of the rites over three days.

As with a family funeral, people come to the temple and make an offering at the registration counter. This one was run by officials from the Tetsaban Phana. 

Civil servants always wear their full-dress uniform (Prarajatan) and medals together with a black arm-band on an occasion such as this.The Governor of Amnat Charoen Province was presiding over the ceremony. He was sitting in the front row of the furthest marquee on the left, together with the District Officer, the mayors of Tetsaban Phana and Tetsaban Phra Lao and other VIPs. I took this photo from my seat, using a zoom lens. I was way back but cool and shaded under a tree. A lot of people preferred not to sit near me because also under the tree were some empty wheelie bins for rubbish, but they came round to the idea when they realised there was nowhere else available.

 

 

There were also a lot of people in white, mostly women. They had taken 8 precepts for the day. The marquee on the right, below, was where the monks were chanting.

The pile of robes were later presented to the monks who chanted by ten people whose names were read out. You may imagine my alarm when I heard my name read out. Nobody had told me this was going to happen. It took me a long time to make my way there, so I offered a set of robes some way down the seniority pecking order. The monk said, "Oooh, good, good! Geng, geng!" They don't normally say anything when an offering is made to them.

The royal flame arrived in a very special vehicle and all the civil servants lined up to form a double reception line. They bowed as it went past, but this dog didn't. He did seem to have had a shampoo for the occasion, though.

 
 
Finally, everyone filed up to place a symbolic addition to the funeral pyre. There was a small panic when flames started spreading along the base of the coffin, but then an announcement came over the loudspeaker that this was NOT the start of the cremation and someone extinguished it with a bottle of water.

Before I reached the coffin, the firecrackers were let off. There were 21 of them, befitting his status, I suppose. Mr Ing always supervises the firecrackers and he would be back in the evening to let off fireworks at the end of the mor lam performance.

It took me 30 minutes to shuffle up to the coffin platform, place my offering and leave down one of the two side stairways. For most of the time I was grasped firmly by a person behind me but we were so squashed I couldn't turn fully round to see who it was. When we had escaped the crush I did turn round and was wai-ed and thanked by a lovely little old lady.

It took a full 45 minutes for everyone to complete this ritual. I estimated that there were between 3 - 4,000 people there, and well over a hundred monks.

The whole ceremony had taken just over 3 hours. The longest funeral, and the grandest, I have ever attended.

Just another quiet day in Phana

I have to thank the Oyster Band for my title today although their song was much more heavily ironic than this post will be. That's because it really was a quiet day in Phana and as it got dark here this evening I was thinking that nothing at all had happened. But on reflection that is not quite true.

The loudspeaker from Moo 9 started up really early today, about 5 a.m. it woke me and by the sound of it it had been going on a while. There is a special harvest festival being held at Wat Burapa in Moo 9 over the next three days and it started this morning.

By about 7.15 Pensri and I were out in the drive playing badminton, a daily activity for us and a source of entertainment for the busloads of schoolkids who go by between this time and 8 o'clock. My usual intense concentration was disturbed though by what I saw on the cables strung out along the far side of the road. I rushed for my camera and then rushed with it up the road, The result was poor but at least it is proof that I'm not just making all this excitement up.

Now something like this would not get a mention if I lived in Lopburi, but here it only happens about once a year. I suspect that it is the same elderly male that goes walkabout on the wires. He is heading home here but is still about a km away.  

As we were eating breakfast on the verandah (it makes us think we are at Southfork) a young woman came by and squatted down next to Pensri and asked her advice on some family problems she is having. I wandered off to my 'study' at the back of the house to do some work on an extended piece of writing I am currently busy with in an off and on sort of way. A friend of mine, a former illegal immigrant now made legal, came by with a gift of a large fish. We said we would have it for lunch and an hour or so later he was back with lots of vegetables for us to eat with it. While he was away a friend of Pensri's came by with a ripe papaya from her garden. So that was a bit more lunch for us.

Pensri went off to do some photo-copying and while she was away another annual sort of traveller went by on a bicycle. I'm not easily fooled so I knew straight away that it was Santa Claus. Except, of course, that it wasn't. Because I caught a glimpse of a very neat leg emerging from the red robe. You shouldn't be in my blog, I thought, get back, get back to  where you once belonged Mrs Claws.

Lunchtime came and the fish was one I had never had before, The flesh was similar in colour and texture to a trout but it was a much chubbier fish (though I have never eaten chub) and a bit oily for my taste. Good though. And the papaya was sweeter and jucier than many we buy.

A couple of hours after lunch we were both on the verandah again, this time I was having a foot massage from the woman I met at the community day recently. A man from Wat Phra Lao committee came and talked us into donating towards moving the crematorium a bit further west. At the moment they need money for land-filling, 200 Baht a truck-load.  He had a big accounts book with him and took a long time telling us who had paid up so far and how much. So he put us down for 5 loads and we paid up. We don't much like their reasons for moving the crematorium (more room for the stage when they hold the annual festival) but on the other hand it will be moved further from us, so on balance it's to our advantage.

A couple more visitors. Ajarn Kanet, headteacher of one of Phana's schools, came round to talk to Pensri about the school reunion they are organizing together. Then, just after I had finished my foot massage, another ajarn came round to collect some proof-reading I had done of some work sheets he had prepared for his English classes.

And finally (but I can't really be sure of this for at least another hour since it is now 8.30 p.m.) Mr Arporn came round, coughing badly. Yesterday he was coughing worse and took himself to the district hospital just before dusk. He took a short cut from his house through Don Chao Poo, the local forest and monkey sanctuary. On one of the sandy tracks he came across a python, about 6 metres long and as fat as his admittedly skinny thigh. He didn't have much time to be frightened but he managed to be and accelerated past it because he reckoned if he had braked he would have stopped right up next to it. He also mentioned that it was lucky he wasn't on his bicycle becaue it doesn't have any lights. I don't actually think pythons are a danger to fully-grown humans but I didn't want to spoil his story. And I may be wrong. I definitely wouldn't hang around to put my theory to the test.

People used to talk about the python in Don Chao Poo but a couple of years ago the monkey population started to increase and it was assumed that the python was no more. It was a defunct python. Etc, etc, etc. I met an Englishman a couple of years ago who lives about 75 kms away. He said that he used to have a Burmese python but it grew too big so he put it in a box and drove it to Don Chao Poo where he released it, hoping it liked macaque monkeys. So I just wonder ...

I am also wondering whether tomorrow will be another quiet day in Phana. We shall see.

 

Happy Returns to Phana

I got back to Phana yesterday from my trip to Malaysia and a few days in Bangkok. I had only been away ten days so unsurprisingly nothing had really changed. The harvest is just about completed so the fields have changed colour quite dramatically. And the weather has changed again. When I left it had got unseasonably hot again after a very brief cold spell. But when I got here at about mid-day it was immediately apparent that the cold weather was back. And by bed-time I was closing all the windows and searching for more blankets.

 

When I got back to Phana in September after six months away, there had been more significant changes so I went around taking photos. The new market and bus station was well on the way to completion, now scheduled for a December opening.

 

 

 

A private building project that had been completed was the new 'resort' just outside town. It looks very nice and has a restaurant with several items listed that I really like but can not get in Phana. Tod mun kung, for eaxample. The waitress said they had that every day so I ordered some. Not today, I was told about 15 minutes later. On my next (and probably last) visit, exactly the same thing happened. All that glitters ...

 

I'm not expecting Phana to become a major tourist destination, however. When I asked how much the bungalows were, I was quoted two prices, one for three hours and one for the night. So I guess they are not exactly aiming at too many long-term visitors. But they do quite a good trade in karaoke, even at lunch time.

The most mysterious change was to the course of the Huay Phra Lao. Upstream from the bridge the banks had been cleared and the stream revealed to be divided, whether around a small island or not I haven't been able to find out yet. The view is certainly improved and it looks as if a riverside walk is planned. Previously the stream only seemed to come from the top right of this picture. 

 

Back in 1982 I swam upstream of the bridge with our kids and some relatives. I can't imagine anyone doing that now, though doubtless it is no less wholesome than it was then and I don't remember anyone getting ill or anything. A little child nearly got swept away but wouldn't have got far because the bridge was just being built then and there was lots of bamboo scaffolding in the river forming a kind of porous dam. I think the present bridge is a newer one.

 

Downstream nothing has changed. A lot of fishing goes on at the weir, usually.

 

Who said Isan is a desert? Not here, it isn't. The Huay Phra Lao divides the old town of Ban Phana from the new town, the amphur. A few kilometres downstream it joins the larger Se Bok, which in turn flows into the Mae Nam Mun east of Ubon. The Mun in turn flows into the Mekong at Khong Chiam, and then it's all the way to the sea through Cambodia and Vietnam.

People thought I would be interested in the new machines set up around the old market place in Ban Phana and along the road where the tetsaban offices are in the amphur. But believe me, despite their lurid colours, taking these photos is the nearest I am likely to get to these things. Other people find them amusing, though, especially round about dusk. Not at the moment, perhaps. Too cold.

 

Close up they are even more off-putting.

 

More to my taste are these new kuti in Wat Phra Lao:

 

So Phana changes, but so far it still looks very nice, I think, and I can't imagine not being glad to get back here. So, many more happy returns, I hope.