Uttaradit Life

Wat Phra Thaen Sila At: The Buddha's Stone Seat in the Hills of Laplae On a low, wooded hill in Thung Yang, in the Laplae district west of Uttaradit city, there is a block of laterite stone about eight feet wide and ten feet long. It does not sound like much, described that way. And yet this stone seat — the Phra Thaen Sila At — is the most sacred object in Uttaradit province: the provincial seal itself carries the little pavilion built over it, pilgrims have climbed this hill for centuries to kneel before it, and once a year the whole province seems to converge here for one of the great temple fairs of the lower North. The belief is simple to state and large to contemplate. The stone platform is held to be a seat where the Buddha himself sat and preached — in some tellings, a place where not one but all five Buddhas of this world-age came to meditate. Around that belief a temple grew: Wat Phra Thaen Sila At, today a royal monastery of the third class in the Thammayut order, its ...

Laplae: The Hidden Valley Town That Cannot Tell a Lie — and Grows Thailand's Finest Durian Every Thai province has a place its people talk about in a slightly different voice, and in Uttaradit that place is Laplae. The name itself means "hidden from sight," and the town earns it: a green valley folded into the hills west of Uttaradit city, tucked behind the Mae Phun hills so neatly that for centuries outsiders genuinely struggled to find it. Roads go in, the hills close behind you, and suddenly you are in a small, quiet, orchard-covered town that feels a world away from the provincial capital barely twenty minutes behind you. Laplae carries two claims to fame, and they sit oddly well together. The first is a legend — one of the best-known folk tales in northern Thailand — about a hidden town of women where lying was forbidden, and where a man who told one small, kind lie was banished forever. The second is fruit. Laplae grows what many Thai durian lovers consider the fi...