Qualla: Nakhon Phanom

Nakhon Phanom: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hdamm, CC BY-SA 3.0. Somewhere between 1928 and 1931, a Vietnamese exile in his late thirties lived in Ban Nachok, a village a few kilometres west of Nakhon Phanom, among Vietnamese families who had already made this stretch of the Mekong home. He was organising, quietly, under a name that was not the one history settled on. Four decades later, American aircraft were taking off from a runway near that same village to attack the supply network the world had named after him. The house is still there. So is the runway. They are perhaps fifteen minutes apart by road, and the town between them has spent a very long time being a small place with an outsized view of other people's wars.

Read more: Nakhon Phanom on Qualla

Image: Hdamm | CC BY-SA 3.0

Nakhon Phanom: The House on the Road to the Airfield

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hdamm, CC BY-SA 3.0. Ho Chi Minh's preserved home and the museum built beside it draw a steady flow of Vietnamese visitors, which makes Nakhon Phanom one of the few Thai towns where the tour buses arrive from Hanoi rather than Bangkok. The Vietnamese presence here is much older and broader than one f...

Read more: Nakhon Phanom on Qualla

Image: Hdamm | CC BY-SA 3.0

Nakhon Phanom: The War Run by Computer

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Penyulap, CC BY-SA 3.0. The US airfield west of town, built by Navy Seabees in 1962 and opened for flying the following June, became the home of the 56th Air Commando Wing in April 1967 - redesignated the 56th Special Operations Wing in August 1968. It flew propeller aircraft in a jet age: A-1 Skyraider...

Read more: Nakhon Phanom on Qualla

Image: Penyulap | CC BY-SA 3.0

Nakhon Phanom: Boats Made of Fire

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bunjira L., CC BY-SA 4.0. At the end of Buddhist Lent, communities across the province build scaffolds of bamboo, mount them on boats, and hang them with tin cans of kerosene stuffed with rags. After dark the wicks are lit and the boats are pushed onto the Mekong, and the bamboo frames resolve into blazin...

Read more: Nakhon Phanom on Qualla

Image: Bunjira L. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Nakhon Phanom: Two Towns, One River

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Oatz assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. Thakhek, capital of Laos's Khammouane province, sits directly across the water; from the Nakhon Phanom promenade you are looking at another country's provincial capital over a few hundred metres of current. The Third Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge, opened on 11 November 2011 about 10...

Read more: Nakhon Phanom on Qualla

Image: No machine-readable author provided. Oatz assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain

Nakhon Phanom: Skylabs and Sticky Rice

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P.khiao, CC BY-SA 4.0. Around town you travel by skylab, the northeast's three-wheeled motorcycle taxi, or you rent a bicycle and take the waterfront cycleway, which runs roughly 12 km north of the city - flat, quiet, scenic and merciless in the afternoon heat. The food argument here is settled: sticky...

Read more: Nakhon Phanom on Qualla

Image: P.khiao | CC BY-SA 4.0