HOT Magazine Oct 15, 2015 | Page 57

provides a service twice a day to Loei Airport. Let’s now move onto something more intriguing. The province of Loei has one of the more curious mottos out of all the Thai provinces. It is extravagantly known in full as “City of the Sea of Mountains, Coldest Place in Siam, and Beautiful Flowers of the Three Seasons”. Let us explore this phrase in depth and explain its veracity. We begin with the first segment. Loei is a truly wonderful paradise of mountainous ranges, of which three peaks in particular grab the attention: the Phu Kradueng, the Phu Reua and the Phu luang all stand tall and proud above the skyline of the province and provide a distinctive identity to it. Let us now look at the next segment. How many places do you know in Thailand to reach temperatures below zero degrees Celsius? Is that even possible? Well if you didn’t know any, now you do: Loei’s winters have often reached the minus two mark on thermometers, thus rightly so, it is indeed one of the coldest places of our otherwise tropical Siamese paradise. Temperatures are not freezing the year around however. Far from it, registers of thirty degrees Celsius are commonly observed during the summer and early spring. In that sense, Loei’s climate can be said to be truly continental. How about segment three of that motto? Imparting a fringe to Laos through the Mekong River, Loei province is in many ways more like the north of Thailand than the rest of the Isan region to which it belongs. It is a place in which mountain ranges combine with a diverse array of beautiful flora. Amassing itself in and around the aforementioned three mountainous elevations of the region, the diversity of wonderful blossoms and trees is truly a magnificent sight. We find thus a wonderful scenario, above which clouds set and provide the spectacular view of which visitors and locals alike can be fortunate to savour. October 15 - November 15 , 2015 57