Thailand
All of the Thailand pages were written during our two year stay while working for the British Council between 2005 and 2007.
Sukhothai sojourn
29 Dec 2005Sukhothai is one of the top World Heritage sites in South East Asia. We spent a weekend in December 2005 exploring the wondrous ruins.
New Year with the Karen
10 Jan 2006This is the photojournal of an exciting trip me and Jackie did around New Year 2005/06. We hired motorbikes in Chiang Mai and headed off to the Myanmar border at Mae Sariang. Here we found a guide and he took us up to a Karen hilltribe village where we stayed for New Year’s Eve. It also describes our hazardous trek back to civilisation. A six lane highway is not quite what I expected from a trip to the Thai-Myanmar border,…
Chinese New Year
28 Jan 2006What better time to explore Bangkok’s chinatown than Chinese New Year? Here are a few snaps and a bit of info covering our wanderings in January 2006. Chinatown is a densely packed area of ‘downtown’ Bangkok which hugs one of the main thoroughfares and therefore also often takes its name – Yaowarat. All year long red is the defining colour of the area most notably in the gold shops lining this main road. But during Chinese New Year, it goes…
Weekend in Ayuthaya
11 Feb 2006Ayuthaya was the Siamese royal capital from 1350 to 1767, when it was destryoed by the Bumese. In its prime it was home to over a million people and international commerce flourished. In fact most of the evidence of its splendour come from accounts of European travellers who described it as the most splendid city on Earth. Those days are now well gone and Ayuthaya, the ruined city, is a pleasant excursion from the traffic clogged streets of Bangkok which…
Kanchanaburi
18 Mar 2006Kanchanaburi is best known as the location of the original Bridge over the River Kwai (the real one – not the film location – which was shot in Sri Lanka). It is therefore firmly on the tourist trail. The bridge itself is right in the middle of town – which like many modern Thai towns is ugly, unplanned and a riot of concrete. The main drag (pictured below) could be worse – at least it’s not on the main road…
Seadragon divetrip
16 Apr 2006The Similan and Surin Islands are supposed to be one of the top dive spots in South East Asia if not the world, and we weren’t disappointed. We had decided to visit them on a 5 day liveaboard with Seadragons, a dive company operating out of Khao Lac. Jackie had dived with them before. They are highly recommended as they are very professional, reasonably priced and as they operate out of Khao Lac rather than Phuket and so closer to the…
On the road to Angkor
12 May 2006Cambodia is home to everything Khmer, right? Well actually when the Khmers were at their peak, building Angkor Wat etc, they also ruled plenty of Thailand and in May 2006, I went to see some of the lesser known, but really impressive Khmer ruins, close to the Cambodian border in Buriram province. (There is another interesting Khmer ruin – Prasat Meuang Singh in Kanchanaburi province – which is covered on that page of my website) The best of these are…
Lost paradise
26 Jul 2006Overall our trip to Ko Samui was a little disappointing. It certainly wasn’t paradise island. Maybe at one time, but rampant overdevelopment have meant those days were long gone. As you will see from the photos the sand is still wonderful, but the backdrops of swaying palms have become construction sites and the green lush hillsides become bare red scars soon be covered with tourist developments. First the good news – the beaches are still lovely, some more crowded than…
Nan and the remote north
19 Oct 2006It was mid October in Bangkok. As per normal it was hot, busy and congested. In addition, the wet season was kicking in with a vengeance. We had a week’s holiday. We wanted to stay in Thailand but wanted to get away from it all and be as dry as possible. Generally the driest place in Thailand is Ko Samet, but we went there last weekend. We decided on Nan, an obscure province up north which had been a hideout…
Loi Krathong
5 Nov 2006The feast “LOI KRATHONG” is an event that happens every year in Thailand on the full moon of the 12th lunar month (first full moon day of November). On the night of the festival in 2005 we headed to the river in Bangkok (the Chao Praya ) to see what the fuss was all about and to enjoy a riverside meal. NB – We also went in 2006 and I’ve added some more pictures. Throughout the evening we saw many…
Island in the sun
21 Nov 2006We’d been in Thailand a month (Sep ’05) – all of that time in the steaming metropolis which is Bangkok. Although the wet season hadn’t been as bad as expected, our soi was still calf deep in water when we paddled off to our first holiday. We’d picked Ko Samet because it was fairly quiet, accessible and it promised to be one of the driest spots in Thailand in October. We were very pleasantly surprised – it wasn’t as developed…
Ko Chang
27 Dec 2006I was told Ko Chang was the new Ko Samui, Presumably this meant it was a once pristine island on the downhill slope to environmental degradation caused by uncontrolled tourist development. Perhaps they meant it in a more positive light. I wasn’t sure. I went there Christmas 2006 to find out. There are in fact two Ko Changs (literally Elephant Island) in Thailand and probably more. I was going to the big one – down the east coast expressway until…
A bend in the river
10 Jan 2007To many visitors to Thailand, their fondest memories come from Isaan, the North Eastern ‘bulge’ of Thailand. However, it doesn’t rate much of a mention in many guidebooks because of the relative paucity of grand Thai monuments – either man made or natural. Its charm lies in the friendly people and the more relaxed, traditional pace and style of life. That was exactly what me Jackie were after when we went for a week’s exploring around the area of Nong…
Khao Yai National Park
20 Feb 2007Khao Yai is Thailand’s oldest and also one of its biggest National Parks. At an average of 700m above sea level, its climate is reasonable pleasant all year round and as it is only 2.5 hours outside Bangkok it is also one of the most popular parks. We went up for a long weekend in February 2007. We got the bus to Pak Chong, the nearest town of any size, which is itself about two hours from Bangkok. From here…
Bangkok ‘burbs
Around the outskirts of Bangkok there are many interesting nooks and crannies to explore. This page covers three: Chatuchak Market in the North, Ko Kred even further north and a walk around Thonburi, on the other side of the Chao Praya river to Bangkok, so close but yet relatively undiscovered. I’ve got another page: Bangkok wanderings which include further walks more in the centre of Bangkok. The first is Chatuchak Market, one of the biggest markets in Asia. It is…
Bangkok wanderings
22 Feb 2007Bangkok to foreigners, Krung Thep to locals, City of Angels to people of the past, city of horrific traffic jams to people of today. You can read all about this amazing city elsewhere, for here is just an eclectic mixture of photos I’ve taken over the past few months. I’ve tried to avoid the typical tourist shots and hope to continually update this page as I continue my explorations. My first picture is fairly typical however, a shot of the…
Coconut Paradise
14 Apr 2007Touring Nakhon Si Thammarat province April 07. It is said that in the 1970’s a few hippies stumbled across Ko Samui and found paradise, with powder-white sands, clear turquoise water and gently swaying palms. Over the next 30 years this paradise was swamped with ever encroaching development. Now, there seems to be more concrete than sand. However, perhaps not surprisingly, just across the water from Samui there are beaches near the fishing village of Khanom, which are still in pristine…
The Far North
13 May 2007I lived in Hanoi for two years and loved heading off into the mountains to explore the rugged countryside and photograph the many different hill tribes that inhabited the completely undeveloped and wild regions of the north. In fact I even designed a website of my travels with the unimaginative name of “Ethnic Minorities of Northern Vietnam”. However, I had never explored the areas of far northern Thailand which was even more famous for its colourful local people. I knew…
Charoon Court
30 Jun 2007I thought this page would be of interest only to family members and friends, but then again it could be of interest to anyone who is interested in comparing how different people (in this case us) live in different countries. Anyway, have a look through our keyhole and see what you think. The photos below were taken on the day we moved into our apartment block (Sep 2005) and then two years later (June 2007) before our big move to…
Our Videos of Thailand
10 Sep 2007This page features the videos from the Thailand pages of globalwanderings. However there are also some vids which don’t appear on globalwanderings at all and also a few more which are from www.podcastsinenglish.com. This is a site which Jackie and I have set up to help learners and teachers of English – so the commentary is specifically simplistic but the videos should be quite fun to watch. The first two vids are our first forays into recording and editing for the site…