Khon Kaen for Digital Nomads
Khon Kaen is one of Isaan's big four cities, located both geographically and characteristically between Udon Thani and Nakhon Ratchasima. Whereas Udon has a nascent but noticeable tourist presence, Nakhon Ratchasima has little to offer foreigners beyond a local experience. Khon Kaen lands somewhere in the middle. You will see other foreigners here and there is a small area of foreigner-aimed bars, but in the main it's a city that most visitors to Thailand don't have a reason to stop in.
It's perhaps at that perfect level, where there are enough foreigners that you're not a novelty and no one gives a fuck about you, but there aren't so many that there's any tourist industry. You can go about your day largely uninterrupted.
It's a deceptively vegan-friendly place, there are some big night markets that are fun to explore, it has a large reservoir that's lovely to go for a walk or a run, it's safe, incredibly affordable, the wifi is fast and reliable, the streets are very walkable, the people are friendly, and the little area of foreigner-aimed bars gives you somewhere welcoming to go in the evenings. In terms of what I look for as a digital nomad, it has everything.
When I wrote the first version of this article after my first stay here, I said that my only regret was that I didn't stay longer. That's also my regret after my second stay. I would gladly stay here indefinitely.
This is the City Pillar Shrine. I'm not sure why you'd have a shrine to a pillar, but it's on the way to the Central shopping mall, so you'll probably run into it too.
Who is Khon Kaen suitable for?
To enjoy Khon Kaen you need to be someone who's happy with isolation. It's not a touristy place so you won't find much going on socially. The small cluster of foreigner-aimed bars provides some respite, but come here expecting to spend a lot of time on your own.
The city is very walkable, but also quite spread-out and slow-paced, so you can expect to have to walk for 30 minutes to get to the supermarket, for example. I'd say that Khon Kaen is good for people who like being outside, who aren't in a rush and have plenty of free time, and who are comfortable in their own company.
How affordable is Khon Kaen?
As with the rest of Isaan, Khon Kaen is phenomenal value, even by Thai standards. You will easily find a nice hotel room for less than 1,000 baht per night, you'll spend less than 100 baht per meal in local restaurants, and expect about 80 baht for a bottle of local beer in a bar.
Is Khon Kaen safe?
Completely. As there are no tourists, there are no tourist scams. I wasn't aware of any crime when I was here, and felt very safe walking around in the middle of the night.
Is it easy to get by with English in Khon Kaen?
You will find some English spoken, but most people I dealt with in my day didn't speak any. In the restaurants I regularly went to for example, the staff spoke no English.
Like anywhere, you can get by with sign-language and caveman noises, but if you want to be able to communicate well I recommend brushing-up on your Thai.
Things I don't like about Khon Kaen
I'm really scraping at the bottom of the barrel to come up with something to write here. I guess my biggest grievance is that the city's main bus terminal is located miles outside the city centre.
In this part of the world there are no comprehensive online listings of bus times so being able to easily get to the bus station to research things yourself is useful, and it's a bit of a pain when you have to sit in a taxi for 20 minutes just to get there.
According to Google Maps, if I were to walk from my hotel to the bus station it would take me an hour and fifty-one minutes.
Being sociable in Khon Kaen
I'm unaware of any English language events in Khon Kaen designed for meeting people. I certainly haven't found any Meetup events, for example.
Instead, there's a small cluster of foreigner-aimed bars in front of the Pullman Hotel. And by small, I do mean small. There's at most a dozen of them. If you've come here from Pattaya, or even Udon Thani, you might be shocked at how tame it is, but they're still a nice place to come and start chatting to people.
I've been to four or five of these bars. They're all pretty much the same, so I'd say just wander past them all (it'll only take about a minute) and go into whichever you fancy.
Where to run in Khon Kaen
All of my runs in Khon Kaen have been at Bueng Kaen Nakhon Reservoir.
Isaan is notorious, in my mind if no one else's, for putting lovely pathways and running tracks around all large bodies of water in their cities. It's true in Nakhon Ratchasima, it's true in Udon Thani, and it's true here.
One lap of the reservoir is 3.2km, and it's a really pleasant place to run, so long as you like to run in the daytime. A word of warning:
One of Khon Kaen's night markets is the Bueng Kaen Nakhon Night Market. It takes place at the north end of the reservoir and gets very crowded. And while the night market itself doesn't cover the pathway around the lake, there's so much spillover of people that this northern part of the lake gets much harder to run around after dark, so it's a better place to come for daytime runs.
Coming here to run, or even to walk, Bueng Kaen Nakhon Reservoir is lovely. This is the inner path that I tend to run along, but there's also an outer path shared by pedestrians and bicycles that has fewer obstacles so is better suited for faster runners.
Where to get vegan food in Khon Kaen
Khon Kaen has a small number of vegan Thai restaurants, so you aren't going to go hungry here. That's the good news.
The bad news is that these typically close very early, so by mid-afternoon your options get a lot more limited. The other bad news is that if you don't like Thai food, you're kind of shit outta luck.
There's one branch of Subway in Khon Kaen. They're open until 9pm and have a vegan chicken sub on the menu for when you get really desperate. Kem-Kon Khon Kaen (below) are also open late and do delivery (with some caveats). That aside, get used to eating Thai and get used to eating early.
I typically don't eat dinner anyway, so this suits me, but if you can't go without an evening meal, all these restaurants do take-away, so the option is there to get something to reheat in the microwave later.
Boon Baramee is a vegan restaurant down by the lake. I discovered it quite late in my stay so only came here once, but it's definitely a good option. Unlike in those below, the staff speak very good English. This plate of three choices from the buffet with rice only cost 50 baht.
Su Ting Sian
Su Ting Sian is a fully-vegan restaurant with a picture menu in Thai and questionable English. The incredibly friendly staff don't speak much English, but pointing works if you don't speak Thai.
It has several tables inside to sit at. It's not air conditioned but there are many fans so it feels pretty cool in the restaurant. It's often quiet so pick a table right in front of a fan if it's hot outside.
The portion sizes are massive, and closing at 4pm each day it's a good place to come for a late lunch. It's almost exclusively Thai food on the menu, which I recommend you stick to because it's mostly really good. There are a small number of western (pasta) dishes on the menu. These I don't recommend.
This is written in the menu as water dumplings. It's good to see dumplings being served in their natural habitat for a change. They'll cost you 50 baht.
Real Vegan
I can't overstate how much I like this place.
It's actually two businesses in one. There's a point-and-hope เจ ("jay") buffet restaurant similar to those you find all over Thailand, and there's an (almost) vegan health-food shop better than any other I've come across in the world.
The Thai name ตะวันทองมังสะวิรัติ is pronounced roughly as 'dtà wan tɔɔng mang sà wí rát', and translates to Golden Sun Vegetarian. For some reason it also has an English name 'Real Vegan'. Perhaps intended for clarity for non-Thai speakers, it's actually a bit confusing because you'll see this place referred to as both Tawanthong Vegetarian and as Real Vegan.
The restaurant here is great. As is customary for such restaurants, they open early and close early (6am to 2pm), so you really want to be here by about 12:30pm to ensure there's a good selection left. The staff don't speak any English, so get ready with your best sign-language if you don't speak Thai. As such restaurants go, this one is pretty high quality and typically great value.
One thing I noted is that on my first visit to Khon Kaen in January 2024, I didn't speak any Thai. I would typically get rice with five choices from the buffet and a bottle of water, and be charged 120 baht. By my return at the end of 2024 I was about four months into learning Thai and could hold my own in a conversation, and so would order in Thai as opposed to caveman noises. I would again get five choices from the buffet with a bottle of water, but instead be charged 80 baht.
I've often heard of restaurants giving better prices to people who can speak the local language, but this was the first time I unequivocally experienced it. Ordering the exact same thing in Thai took 33% off the price.
The second business here is a shop that thinks it's vegan, but isn't quite (I scanned the ingredients of many items they sell, and found one quite subtly containing milk). That aside it's aisles of just vegan produce, including a great selection of nuts and seeds, which I get through a lot of, and two aisles of just tea.
If I died and went to heaven it would look something like that. And while the restaurant closes at 2pm, the shop stays open until 6pm so you can buy nuts until sunset, just like you've always wanted.
The restaurant at Real Vegan, if that is its real name, is your typical เจ buffet, but I found this one to be pretty high quality. I bought this plate of rice with five options from the buffet on my first visit to Khon Kaen when I couldn't speak any Thai. With a bottle of water I was charged 120 baht.
Kem-Kon Khon Kaen
Kem-Kon Khon Kaen is the restaurant that you don't expect to find in Khon Kaen. It's a western-style vegan restaurant akin to something you'd expect in Bangkok, not in the middle of Isaan. If you've ever been to Veganerie in Bangkok, I liken it to that, in style more than menu.
The menu, while having some western items like the cashew cheese lasagna (195 baht), is far more Asian oriented. Rather the style and feel of the place, it feels western. And while it's a place that I suggest that you visit while in Khon Kaen, even just once, the location fucking sucks.
I walked when I came here. Much of that walk was around the very pleasant Bueng Kaen Nakhon Reservoir, but the restaurant is so far south of the city centre that by the time you get here you're walking along the dusty sides of a main road without pavements, in an almost industrial area.
No problem though, they also do delivery through Grab. It's just that unless you speak Thai you're going to have a hard to finding them on the app. They're listed as เข้ม ข้น 100% วีแกน - สาขาขอนแก่น, so search for that. Searching for Kem Kon doesn't yield any results. And while some parts of the menu on Grab are translated into English, not all of it is, so you're probably going to be taking screenshots and using Google Translate to figure-out what you want to order.
The food once delivered is perfectly nice and it's great to have vegan restaurant food available until late, but you're going to pay twice the price for half as much food compared to the restaurants above. By Isaan standards it's not great value.
In that sense it's a funny little place. Great to have a vegan restaurant that does delivery until late, but somewhere I'd only order from when desperate.
Putting the Ku Klux Klan to shame with their alliteration, Kem Kon Khon Kaen is a vegan restaurant like I wasn't expecting to find here. Western-style vegan restaurants are usually reserved for Bangkokkk, Chiang Mai and the other tourist-heavy places. This is the teriyaki tofu bowl for 85 baht.
Where I stayed
Manomon Residence
| Room | 6,183.49 THB |
| Total |
6,183.49 THB
(772.94 THB per night)
|
| Room | 10,504.67 THB |
| 7% VAT | 735.33 THB |
| Total |
11,240.00 THB
(936.67 THB per night)
|
In both of my stays at Manomon Residence I've been in the deluxe king room, which at 33m² is ironically the smallest room they offer. I'm not sure when it became normal for the king to sleep in the smallest room. As there's not much in the room other than the bed, it's a very spacious room, even for a fat king. Sufficiently spacious for yoga and bodyweight workouts.
There's a decent-sized TV mounted on the wall, and below it is a large surface. There's not really any cupboard space in the room, so instead you find yourself using this surface for everything. I kept my clothes on there, I setup my workstation there, I made my smoothies on there. It's big enough that you can do all of that.
There is also a table and a couple of chairs that might be more suited in a garden. These get less use, but still nice to have.
Unfortunately there aren't cooking facilities of any kind in the room, even a microwave, but it does at least have a kettle and a fridge. There's a microwave in the hotel lobby that you're free to use.
The bathroom is especially nice considering the low price of the room, and you also have another sink on the balcony more suitable for things like washing up. The wifi in the room is fast and reliable - I'm yet to have any connection issues when staying here, and I really like the location. Most of the places you're going to want to go to are within a 25 to 30 minute walk, including Central Plaza, Bueng Kaen Nakhon Reservoir, and most of the vegan restaurants detailed above.
The staff are very friendly, although as the reception is curiously on the second floor, you don't ever really see them once you've discovered that it's quicker and easier to go through the car park any time you go out.
One point to note is that on my first stay here, I was in a room on the fourth floor. It had a big, open balcony that let in loads of sunlight. On my second stay, I was in a room on the third floor, and for some reason these balconies are partially walled-up. As you can see in the photos below, this second room let-in a lot less daylight.
If it's as important to you as it is to me to be in a bright room, then perhaps request a fourth-floor room when booking. Other than that I can't fault this place. I've enjoyed both of my stays and will gladly stay again when next in Khon Kaen.
The 33m² deluxe king room doesn't have much in it but the bed, which means that you have plenty of space to exercise. I would do yoga at the foot of the bed.
Summary of Khon Kaen
Do I want to come back again?
Absolutely. Tourist cities in Thailand can be fun in small doses, but you can really have too much of them. Khon Kaen is the perfect antidote.
It's cheap, it's peaceful, and the people are friendly but not overbearing. I would much rather spend my time here than somewhere like Pattaya or Chiang Mai.
I anticipate being back in Thailand regularly over the coming years, and expect Khon Kaen to be a regular feature of my itinerary. It's a place I would gladly stay long-term.