My wife and I recently visited this statue park. In 1974 a mystic, Luang Poo Boun Leua Sourirat, fled from the commies in Laos and came to the nearest place across the border in Thailand which happened to be Nong Khai . As a youth, Luang claimed to have met a shaman , Khaew-ku , down a hole in a forest in Laos. It seems Khaew-ku introduced Luang to the secrets of the underworld , and Luang built the statue park in his honour . Sala-khaew-ku means Pavilion of Khaew-ku. It took about 20 years, and he was still at it when he died in his early 70s in 1996.
The statues represent a hotch-potch of Hindu, Brahmin and other spiritual entities, but I found the place bizarre, even macabre and in some ways quite menacing. Although I’m glad we went there and I certainly recommend that others pay a visit, I don’t have any great urge to return. It all seemed ‘unhinged’, a bit like the works of Salvador Dali.

I visited Wat Sala Kaew koo last April 2009, and was very pleasantly impressed with the magnitude of the scultures, built without most modern machinery,by hand, and mostly by the ''followers'', of Luang Poo Boun Leua Sourirat. It is not the usual Thai style statues, and would highly recommend a visit.