Ubon Ratchathani Candle Festival: Thailand's Most Spectacular Regional Festival

The Ubon Ratchathani Candle Festival (Ubon Candle Procession, or Prasat Thong Festival) takes place every July at the beginning of Khao Phansa — the Buddhist Lent period when monks retreat to their temples for three months. The festival is unique to Ubon Ratchathani and has no equivalent elsewhere in Thailand, and it remains one of the country's most spectacular cultural events without being nearly as internationally known as it deserves — most of the crowd on the day is Thai rather than foreign, which if anything makes the atmosphere more genuine rather than less.

Over several months before the festival, local artisans and temple teams carve enormous wax sculptures — mythological creatures, deities, scenes from Thai history and Buddhist legend — of extraordinary quality and scale. Some sculptures are taller than a house and made entirely of beeswax shaped by hand. On the main festival day, these works are mounted on enormous floats and paraded through the city centre with elaborate costumes, traditional music, and tens of thousands of spectators lining the route. The following day, a beauty contest and traditional performances extend the celebration.

Outside festival time, Ubon Ratchathani is a pleasant university city on the Mun River near the Laos border, with good local food — Isan cuisine at its authentic best — and enough beyond the festival to justify a visit on its own terms. Pha Taem National Park's prehistoric cliff paintings, among the oldest rock art in Southeast Asia, sit on a Mekong-side escarpment with genuinely dramatic sunrise views over the river, and Sam Phan Bok, an expanse of exposed riverbed rock formations further downstream, rewards the same kind of scenery-focused day rather than an adrenaline-driven one. Khong Chiam, where the Mun meets the Mekong, is known locally as the Two-Colour River for the visible line between the two rivers' different-coloured water — what most visitors simply call the pink river confluence — and is one of the more memorable sights in the northeast.

None of the province's best sights are within walking distance of the city, so a rented car or a hired driver is genuinely necessary rather than a convenience — public transport doesn't cover Pha Taem, Sam Phan Bok or Khong Chiam in any practical way. Ubon Ratchathani International Airport sits barely 2km from the city centre, among the closest of any Thai provincial capital, which makes flying in and renting a car locally the simplest way to see everything over a long weekend. Evenings in the city itself are quiet outside festival week — Hua Road near the university has a small run of student bars, but nothing resembling a real nightlife scene — which suits a trip built around temples, rock art and river scenery rather than one built around evenings out.