Somewhere over the rainbow is Udorn Thani

After getting discharged from the hospital in Nong Khai, Thailand and recovering from my unknown tropical illness at a nearby guesthouse, I finally felt good enough to get back on the road and keep moving this epic Southeast Asian trip along. So for the past few days, Masayo and I have been hanging around Udorn Thani in northeast Thailand.

There are few towns as quiet and pleasant – and, it must be said, uneventful – as Udorn Thani. (It’s pronounced, by the way, something like “oo-doan ta-nee”.)

The train from Nong Khai to Udorn Thani was the usual Thai train experience: third class, with open windows and a hot, sweaty, and ultra-relaxed set of local passengers, with whom we sat and bobbed up and down with the rickety but reliable old tracks.

Arriving in Udorn Thani about 10:00 pm, we really put our “plan nothing” approach to traveling to the test: we had no place to stay and could find nothing. Masayo and I, big bags on our backs and smaller bags on our chests, wandered the wide, lit, and carless streets of Udorn Thani looking for a beckoning guesthouse. But none was visible.

Usually this works very well: Thailand is a place you can just show up and find a room. Somewhere. Or so we thought.

I was getting worried. What were we going to do? Sleep at the train station? Is that even possible? As Masayo and I stood on a sidewalk talking it over, a door opened and a guy walked out from the small bar inside.

He began to ask us in broken English if we needed a room, and apologized for being a little tipsy. Normally I’d ignore and/or turn away from anyone approaching us like this, but here in the late evening in a desperate situation, I cautiously let on that I wouldn’t mind hearing what he had to say to us.

He pulled out a wallet and peeled off a business card for me: it was a guesthouse, and he identified himself as the owner. It actually seemed on the up and up. After a couple minutes, during which even in his drunken state he had the business sense and customer service experience to be patient while we talked ourselves into it, we told him we’d like to go check it out – not necessarily get a room there, but take a look.

He hailed a tuk-tuk, told us and the driver that he’d pay the fare, and told him where to take us. A short ride a few streets over later, we got out of the tuk-tuk and looked at the small hotel in front of us, called Top Mansion. I liked it immediately; if I had seen it while walking around thirty minutes earlier I’d have walked right in. It was inviting and just our style.

They had a room and the price was fine. Masayo and I checked in to the second-floor room, energized by the strange experience that had led us here.

And we ended up spending several days there; they have a restaurant downstairs and it’s centrally located. Down the street is a large Irish pub (believe it or not) that serves a big breakfast and caters to Western travelers. The breakfast is full of toast and beans as well as eggs and sausage, and it made my blood sugar high, but it was almost worth it: an excellent deal and a filling meal.

Another day, strolling down the street and having a weak spell – a remnant of my Laos sickness – I told Masayo I wanted to stop into a tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurant for a simple noodle meal. We sat at one of the four tables inside; we were the only customers.

I could understand the Thai menu just enough to read the words for “noodles” and “chicken”. Instantly, childhood images of spooning up Campbell’s soup in bed while staying home from school filled my head. Yes, that’s it! Bring me some of your finest chicken soup, please!

What I got instead was something quite different than I was expecting.

My reverie was coldly shut down when the lady brought the soup: noodles, chives, bits of this and that, and… large, whole chicken feet. Not chicken legs, but the feet.

I laughed, and Masayo (who had ordered something much simpler and had gotten lucky with her choice) looked at me smirking, almost daringly.

My stomach wasn’t feeling right about something as exotic as chicken feet though. I nibbled a toe, mostly just to get the photo, but didn’t actually bite into a foot. What little I did have was rubbery and soft and seemed to be full of little honeycomb-like patterns inside. It was too bad that I couldn’t take this opportunity to add chicken feet to my lifetime culinary experience.

Definitely a chance wasted.

On our final day here we headed out to a large park on the edge of town, which was full of ponds, trees, lawns, and hedges pruned into rabbit shapes. Even better, there was a rainbow in the distant late-afternoon sky. Masayo and I sat and commiserated with the Thai landscape, gazing at the rainbow and feeling quite pleased with ourselves.

And with Udorn Thani; it has been the perfect step to get back into traveling for me: not too wild, but just enough. I feel even better, and tomorrow the trip continues: we’re taking a bus to another small northern Thai town called Loei.

Too bad we’ll have to leave the rainbow rabbits behind. More chicken feet for them, I guess.

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