Best Of/Worst Of:
Thailand

A steam table at night in Bangkok.

The Markets

Every Sunday downtown Chiang Mai sets up an enormous open air market. Half practical and half tourist, it’s the market your hardware store would set up if they came with a side order of oil paintings and handmade jewelry. It’s worth a trip to the city on its own (as, to be fair, would any Ace Hardware with an art section).

Thailand would be a duller, and far more quiet, place without its markets. From the bustling vendors where most commerce happens to the night markets that seem to sprout out of nowhere as soon as the sun sets, almost every Thai community focuses on its outdoor markets. It’s surprising in some ways for a country with only three seasons, two of which are “monsoon” and “hot,” but this much is true about a visit to Thailand:

On your first trip, you might eat in restaurants and shop in a mall. By the second you’ll be pulling up an outdoor stool next to the old hands.

Railei Beach

Thailand’s islands are a shell game. Beautiful, surreal and peaceful at their best, the really popular ones are often vile, victims of their own success (see: Kho Phi Phi below). Railei Beach is, for the time being, a happy mix of the discovered and the not-yet spoiled. Enough tourist dollars have arrived to build up the scuba schools and rock climbing institutes that allow people without their own equipment to indulge in the Andamans’ extraordinary landscapes, and the waterfront has a few nice bars for the evening. Yet the island hasn’t (yet) become a littered, booze addled shell of itself crawling with drugs, flophouses and Muay Thai rings.

My advice? Grab a longboat and head on over now because nice as it is today, who knows how long Railei Beach will last?

Making my way down the cliff at Railei Beach.

The Road from Chiang Mai to Chiang Rai

This is a journey well worth taking. Chiang Rai itself has relatively little to recommend it. It’s a Thai Cleveland, perfectly functional in its unglamorous sort of way but not particularly worth a visit. It just sits up there in the northern mountains quietly getting the job done. Getting to Chiang Rai is another story.

This trip has mountains, sweeping jungles, hot springs and the super trippy White Temple. There’s not much worth staying for once you get to the city, but if you ever want to prove to someone the value of a journey over the destination take them to Chiang Rai.

Worst Of

Minivans

Thai minivans are the devil. If Satan Beelzebub came to Earth and assumed his true form, I’m quite certain it would be as an overcrowded minivan rocketing along a narrow road outside of Surat Thani with passengers barely clinging to their own bags. (Yet seemingly unfazed by the whole experience.)

The only upside to a trip in one of these rattling vomitoriums is that at the speeds they go, there’s a reasonable shot that your own mortality will take care of the motion sickness. Throw in their bizarre hours, frequent stops and the time one driver almost abandoned me at a service station bathroom break and it’s clear: these incredibly common, virtually unavoidable transports are a work of pure evil.

The Shakedown

I dislike describing “the people” in a country. It’s condescending to talk about a nation of individuals like they’re some breed of terrier. This is true despite what appears to be a professional obligation on the part of travel writers to ladle superlatives upon “the people” virtually everywhere we go. Human nature being what it is, I’ve long assumed that there’s some great, rarely visited land where all the assholes hide out every time someone from Lonely Planet comes to town.

The bridge up to the White Temple outside Chiang Rai.

Some impressions stick anyway. In Bangkok it was the feeling that just about everyone saw me as a walking cash machine. Eventually I began to spend every conversation just waiting for the sales pitch. The feeling of perpetually being scammed and shaken down gets old after a while, and I was astonished at what a cheap city Bangkok became once local friends started hailing my cabs.

Now, this is there is an explanation for this. Thailand is a conservative culture. The people who approach you on the street self select to be jerks because those with manners don’t. Making a few friends, and leaving Bangkok, will help a lot, but that feeling of being seen only for your American dollars will probably become a memorable part of any trip to Thailand.

Politics

There’s an air of political coercion to day-to-day life in Thailand that’s distinctly troubling, from standing for the national anthem before watching Batman to the heavily enforced lese majesty laws. The country demands respect for and allows no criticism of the royal family, which makes politics challenging because as soon as a royal weighs in the conversation is over. Much of Thai political debate boils down to deciding whose side the King is on.

Thais don’t shove their politics in the tourists’ faces. In fact, I didn’t notice this until everyone rose for the national anthem one morning at the train station. Once I started paying attention it became hard not to see everywhere.

Thinking deep thoughts, like “should I get a beer or another cup of coffee?”

Working

I love to give advice about how to mix career and travel. You might even call it my job. Unfortunately that’s pretty hard to do here because Thailand has some of the strictest labor laws I’ve ever seen. In a nutshell: foreigners need permission to do any job for any reason that a Thai person could do, even if they volunteer and whether or not a local worker is available. As you might imagine, such permission is not easy to come by.

They take this law very seriously. Most of the usual options for travelers to earn some quick cash, such as bartending or hostel work, are off the table in Thailand (legally at least). One guesthouse in Krabi even had to stop letting guests play music in the common room because south Thailand has musicians. Tourism, teaching and pretty much any other job that needs a good command of English is still open to out-of-towners. Otherwise, trying to legally work or volunteer in Thailand is an uphill battle.

Koh Phi Phi

In fairness, Laura and I did have some fun on Koh Phi Phi. We went to a great little cooking school, had coffees by the water and even spent a wonderful evening at a deserted beach bar just watching the waves. That doesn’t save the overall experience.

Ever since The Beach Koh Phi Phi has been absolutely destroyed by waves of backpackers and locals looking to soak up every baht they can. What once was an island paradise has become a filthy boomtown defined by litter, cheap bars and Muay Thai rings. Absolutely no effort has been made to save this island from development destruction, and today a weekend on Koh Phi Phi is generally defined by aggressive bar touts and knockoff Mexican food. Is it possible to still find a nice spot on this island? Sure, but talk about damning with faint praise.